Misanthropes Anonymous

Red Riding Hood Is An Orange Rind

2011-03-10T22:48:00.003-06:00

I was involved in an argument today over the potential quality of Catherine Hardwicke's probable atrocity Red Riding Hood (and now you know what side of the argument I'm on). I was accused of not liking any movie whose plot/setting/whatever takes place outside of the bounds of reality or potential reality. While it's true that I am often pragmatic to a fault, a statement like that is patently wrong, and I intend in this article to demonstrate that. I also intend to clarify a few things about my opinion on werewolf and vampire movies.

First of all, let it be known that Red Riding Hood has pre-screened for some critics already, and the reviews are almost universally bad. Perhaps the most scathing review comes from Bill Goodykoontz (who didn't ask for that name) of the Arizona Republic:

If, by chance, you've missed "Twilight" and its sequels, don't worry. Shiny, moody, moon-faced and dumb, "Red Riding Hood" pretty much replicates the experience entirely.

Lindy West hyperbolized by calling Hardwicke "World's Worst Human".

The positive reviews are mostly saying that it meets the film's target audience in a sweet spot. That's fine. The movie's doing what the director intended it to do. It proves that studio executives who thought this film would sell were right. It doesn't make the movie objectively good; it just means it's appealing to thirteen-year-old girls.

I haven't seen it, so I can't be too hard on it personally, but I can safely say that the reason I expect not to like this movie has only a little bit to do with it being about werewolves. There are plenty of reasons, and they're all on display in the trailer. Those reasons are on display on purpose, to let the film's target audience know that they are the target audience for the film. Consequently, those reasons also display to me that I am not in the film's target audience.

See, here's the thing — pretend for a moment that ideas are oranges. Yeah. Now get a really thorough juicer and shove that orange into it. Squeeze and smash until you've gotten all that delicious juice and pulp out of the orange. What do you do with the husk of the orange? Well, you're supposed to throw it away. It's pretty much useless. It's all a bunch of rind and tough fiber. You toss it out and you drink the juice. But Hollywood has discovered that if you take that husk and piece it back just so, it can actually kind of resemble an orange again. Now Hollywood can drink the juice and sell the orange back to the 18-25 market at twice the price the orange cost to begin with. This is such a profitable racket that Hollywood has, over the past twenty to thirty years, rapidly moved toward a business model where they sell almost exclusively orange rinds and completely disregard the useful and tasty juice.

Red Riding Hood is an orange rind, and the juicer that made it that way is made of werewolf and fairy tale parts. This is a classic and well-known Grimm's Fairy Tale that's already been juiced a number of times (although mostly into kid's movies, which are sometimes good, like Hoodwinked!, and sometimes bad, like Shrek 2). The werewolf element is way more juiced than the fairy tale aspect, with special thanks to the recent Twilight trend heaving its sparkly, muscular torso through the libidos of middle-aged women across the country. (In case you weren't aware, Catherine Hardwicke directed the first of these atrocities as well.)

And yet, for all of that negative talk, I'm still completely willing to go watch a movie with fantasy/fairy tale elements or which bears werewolves or vampires at the center. I think there's actually a lot that can be done with these elements, and I think they can be wound into some very good films.

The 2004 film The Woodsman used elements of the Little Red Riding Hood story to tell a disturbing and well-crafted tale of pedophilia. Hard Candy did something very similar, and it was also very good. The latter borrows themes from the fairy tale more obviously than the former, but both do it in subtle ways that allow a more rich and original story to unfold from those themes.

Similarly, the concept of a fairy-tale-cum-quality-film is not unheard of. To be completely obvious, Pan's Labyrinth was amazing, and it was in every way — unabashedly — a fairy tale.

I'm not opposed to stories about werewolves or vampires, either. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two Evolution movies. They're objectively mediocre, but they never completely pander to the lowest common denominator, and goddammit, they're fun! Likewise, 30 Days of Night was rather enjoyable as well. It was violent and gruesome and didn't have the happiest of endings. It was visually striking (which Red Riding Hood may be, or it may turn out to be visually obnoxious, like 300) and engaging.

But not all creature features are good just for their fun factor. To write this article and not mention Nosferatu, the vampire movie against which all other vampire movies are judged, would be a crime. But that's old. Recently, vampire movies have been pretty atrocious. The most recent good "serious" vampire movie (that I've seen) may be Interview With the Vampire in 1994, and the goodness of that film is certainly debatable. Applying the same qualifications to the werewolf genre lends An American Werewolf in London in 1981.

Since then, we've seen big-budget vampire movies like

John Carpenter's Vampires
Dracula 2000
Queen of the Damned
Dracula 3000, and
Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires (admittedly, this may not be a big-budget movie, and the vampires may not have been central to the plot)

Werewolves have starred in

Silver Bullet
Teen Wolf (a classic, yes, but not very good, to be honest)
Five sequels to The Howling
Wolf, and
The Wolfman (that remake with Sir Anthony Hopkins)

But I've come to expect garbage like this (especially the sequels) from Hollywood. I'm willing to entertain the idea of good, quality cinema based on these creatures. The monsters make excellent metaphors.

Werewolves symbolize the uncontrollable properties of being that we all have, things we cannot change about ourselves even if we hate them and want to change them. I know it's a spoof and isn't serious in the slightest, but look at 1989's Curse of the Queerwolf. I can actually envision a movie where werewolfism serves as a metaphor for homosexuality. Let it stand for that, or for disfigurement, or for alcoholism. Let it be a post-9/11 symbol for the anger Americans uncontrollably feel against terrorists or their government or for whatever stance the film takes on the matter. Let it be any of these things and begin an examination of some aspect of the human condition.

Vampirism represents lust beyond socially acceptable levels of promiscuity. You wanna make a Little Red Riding Hood movie about vampires? Go for it. Try a film examining the concept of consent in pedophilia. Think Lolita with vampires. That should be a succinct enough pitch. John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus is perfect the way it is, but imagine if the Shortbus nightclub were a hotbed of bloodlust. There's potential in this.

Now, I'm not saying that all of these ideas will inevitably produce quality films, but they all bear the potential to be far more significant than Red Riding Hood is, and I'd be willing to consider watching them. Why? Let me explain the difference between Red Riding Hood and "Shortlust" by comparing two real films: The Strangers and Funny Games.

The Strangers is that 2008 shitheap Liv Tyler did when she realized her "performance" in Lord of the Rings wasn't earning her any stardom. (Oh, admit it. The Lord of the Rings movies were pretty good movies, and at least part of their goodness was due to Liv Tyler standing in front of an industrial hair dryer.) The Strangers didn't earn her any more respect. It's that one where she and Scott Speedman get chased around a house for eighty-six minutes by intruders with burlap sacks over their heads. Eventually, they both die, and the audience is left wishing it had happened about eighty-five minutes sooner.

Funny Games is Austrian director Michael Haneke's 1997 German-language masterpiece where two strangers torture an affluent family in their summer lake house over the course of one gruelling night. It stars Ulrich Mühe, who would win a number of awards for his performance in The Lives of Others nine years later.

So you can see, at least on a surface level, how these movies are similar. In each, you have a small group of well-to-do characters who are chased and ultimately defeated by a roving gang of anonymous attackers. The films could not be more different.

Now, I've already written up a full explanation of why The Strangers is pretty much the worst movie ever. That movie is the only movie I've ever seen that was actually so bad as to cause me psychological duress. Looking back, I realize that I must have wanted to go see that movie. Some part of me thought, "Yeah, The Strangers looks like it could be decent." With perspective, no decent human being could possibly think The Strangers is even remotely decent, and it's beyond my feeble mind to grasp how I could have ever thought that The Strangers would be anything other than an absolutely infuriating, insulting pile of rectal discharge. You can read all about that over here.

But back to my point, which is that you can tell what type of movie each of these films will be within the first three minutes or so. Funny Games opens on a lovely family playing an impromputu version of Name That Tune in their car as they drive to their summer house. The father inserts a classical CD into the car's stereo, and before long, the film's soundtrack abruptly changes to the loudest, most unexpected screaming death metal you'll ever hear. Meanwhile, the family is seen calmly swaying as though they hear a different soundtrack. And they do. They're listening to Mozart or similar. You in the audience are listening to death metal.

The Strangers opens on a wall of scrolling text, which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't narrated for us as though the audience is too stupid to read it themselves. It then moves on to a scene where one person asks the time. The camera gives us a very long, extreme closeup on a clock hanging on the wall. Then, as if we weren't able to determine the time after staring at a clock for fifteen seconds, the other character recites the time.

That's the biggest difference. Funny Games (and for your own sake, don't watch the unforgivably miscast English-language, Naomi Watts-starring, shot-for-shot identical remake by the same director released ten years later) is handled artfully and intelligently, and every time you start getting sucked into the film and start believing that you're in it, Haneke intentionally throws you out of the film. He'll give you a jarring difference between what you hear and what the characters hear to let you know that you're not in the movie. You're watching the movie. A character will look into the camera — he will look straight into your eyes — and wink at you to let you know that you are in the audience. Haneke likes to play with the fourth wall (he does this more subtly in another brilliant film of his, Cache), and he likes to play with the idea of how media affects its consumers. Funny Games is ultimately a film that uses extreme violence with a "we were bored" excuse to show you that by consuming disturbingly violent material, you may be encouraging a more violent future and coddling extremism in youth. Whether you as an audience member agree with this or not is up to you, and Haneke lets you know this by constantly reminding you that you are an audience member and have the ability to think from outside the scope of the film. The Strangers tries for a similar theme, but ends up being the exact kind of garbage Haneke's film protests.

In other words, Funny Games is a delicious fruit juice begging you to consume every ounce of its amazing deliciousness. The Strangers is just the useless, bitter rind left behind.

And if you want to give me vampires and werewolves and fairy tales, I'll take it. But only if you give me the pulpy stuff.

Userland: "She can't remote in"

2010-08-04T19:09:00.001-05:00

The call came in from a man named Joe on behalf of Linda, one of his employees. She's working from home. Or trying to. Something in the WAN-VPN-RDP chain is broken, and she can't access her desktop remotely.

"What's strange," says Joe, "Is that the computer doesn't appear to even have a network connection."

Turns out Joe was a cut above the majority of computer users, but he didn't have the time to investigate the problem himself.

Now, I'm a n00b with my present employer, but I've got years of desktop support (read: apologizing for Windows' general ineptitude and pretending that it's a functional OS in the interest of preserving customer satisfaction) under my belt, and I'm ready to dive in.

A quick glance at the system's network connections shows that although there is a single NIC in the machine (onboard), there are two software configurations for it, both enabled, and one set to a static IP of 0.0.0.0. There's something very wrong about this, so the coworker I'm shadowing, Toni, disables and deletes this erroneous and misconfigured connection. Good move.

Thinking that might be the trouble, she tries to renew the IP address. No dice. It's refusing to pull one.

Reboot.

Still nothing. We can't log into the domain thanks to this IP problem, and have to use a local admin account.

Toni calls Joe back in and asks if it's okay to reimage the machine. She's taken a look at the installed software and is prepared to reinstall the software that our default XP image doesn't supply. I want to object, but I don't want to say anything with Joe standing right there. I'm still a n00b, and I don't want to start my new employment by pissing off my superiors.

Still, I feel my objection is warranted. We have encountered a small bump. Neither of us has done any amount of research into the problem. We haven't looked at the system logs. We haven't checked to see if basic networking services are running. Toni's already jumping onto the Reimage It Express and I'm just now getting into the issue.

Fortunately, the above-the-cut supervisor tells us rather emphatically that we absolutely may not wipe the hard drive. It's not his computer. He doesn't know what software is on there. He doesn't know what data needs to be backed up.

Toni seems depressed. Reimaging sure would have solved the problem.

Well, of course it would have — I won't debate that — but it would have created about a dozen more problems, and that's not how you pull off customer service. It's always seemed rational to me that if you have two ways of solving a technical problem, and one involves data loss while the other doesn't, you always go with the one that doesn't incur data loss. You at least try it. We have no idea what other alternatives we have at this point because we haven't taken the time to look for them. Reimaging seems to me like a Really Bad Idea right now.

I take the opportunity and say something. "I'll do some research, then. No biggie. I can fix this."

Joe is visibly relieved. Toni is visibly shaken. "Why," her face seems to whine, "can't we just reimage this computer?"

"Just give me the trouble ticket, and I'll handle it," I reassure her. And with the promise that liability can be shifted away from her, she relaxes a bit. I take the keyboard and mouse and check the system logs. That's where I find this fantastic error during the boot process:

The DHCP Client service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start control request in a timely fashion.

Sure enough, DHCP Client is stopped. Can I start it manually? Absolutely! Now I've got an IP address, and I'm browsing the Internet. This means I've got a connection to the WAN, and presumably, the RDP pipeline should be up and running again (Terminal Services was running with no obvious problems).

Reboot.

Can't see the domain again. Log in with local admin. DHCP didn't start. Same error. Manually start it. Go to Google.

Thanks to this page at Tom's Hardware, I found a potential solution. It's a reghack of sorts. I need to apply permissions to the registry keys that hold data regarding the various TCP/IP and DHCP services.

Specifically, two keys needed to have global Full Control granted to all users. Those were:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dhcp

Reboot.

And I'm on the domain right away.

I reboot again for good measure and take off.

I dropped by Linda's office this morning. She was in. I asked her if everything was working as expected.

She confirmed that it was.

Make your own indie album cover art

2010-06-14T10:11:00.000-05:00

Here's a simple four-step process that you can use to create your very own indie band album cover art.

Step 1: Click here to get a random article from Wikipedia. This article's title is now your band's name.

Step 2: Click here to get a page full of random quotes. Skip to the last quote on the page and select the last 2-5 words, depending on the quote. Congratulations, you've now got your album name.

Step 3: Click here to get some random photographs from Flickr. The first image in the third column is now your album's artwork.

Step 4: Using GIMP, Photoshop, Paint.NET, MS Paint, or whatever other tools you have at your disposal, crop the image down to an approximate vinyl record album ratio. Type the artist's name and the album title on top of this, preferably in Helvetica font.

Success! An indie album!

Here's mine. I, for some reason, didn't have Helvetica installed, so I used a font called Aaargh that I got from DaFont.com instead.

Review: (500) Days of Summer

2010-05-16T09:52:00.003-05:00

Hollywood has gotten it into their heads that romance is about slapstick comedy, quirky women, and formula screenplays. Over the past fifteen years, romantic comedy movies have become more and more routine and starred more and more Jennifer Lopez, Reese Witherspoon, and Sandra Bullock. They've also made use of cutesier and punnier titles such as Maid in Manhattan, Made of Honor, and 13 Going on 30.

In short, Hollywood has forgotten what love is. Used to be that even when Hollywood was churning out movies for profit that they could still manage to hit upon a Casablanca or Breakfast at Tiffany's, both of which center thematically on different sacrifices one makes for love.

Despite the recent trend of Bride and Prejudice-esque films which carelessly discard love for the sake of ersatz romance in an attempt to make women swoon over the chivalry of impossible men, there are some people who still know how to make a romantic comedy. Case in point: (500) Days of Summer, written by Pink Panther 2 scribes Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber and directed by music video director Marc Webb.

Those are hardly the best credentials, but perhaps that's just the thing romance needs. Everyone here is brand new to the professional creation process, and they're not yet jaded by a business that seems to want to watch Sandra Bullock trip on her own shoes or fall into a hole in the ground or make cute faces. They know these things have nothing to do with romance. They're just cheap gags, and they're not funny.

Sure, (500) Days of Summer has a gimmicky name, but the film's content is as abstract as its title. It reminded me of two other great films, Amelie and Lost in Translation, without ever becoming terribly derivative of them.

Lost in Translation showed us an impossible love based on bad decisions that can't be turned away from. Both lovers realize that to change the previous bad decisions would be worse, yet they continue to discover each other and their love in a landscape they neither understand nor belong in. The Tokyo backdrop is itself a metaphor for the love they find. They are lost in it, but do not care. They cannot comprehend exactly what is going on around them, but they are willing to dive in and enjoy it. In the end, both must leave it behind, never to return. And in that final kiss is held the deepest pain and sadness at realizing all of this, that their true love does have boundaries, and that those boundaries are insurmountable. The film is treated with a realism that gives us the same shared experience that Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson take in, and we love their love more than they realize for it.

Amelie takes a surrealist approach, suggesting that love can't be described accurately in real terms. Amelie takes the audience on a quirky journey through France, looking at chance encounters, seeing seemingly random objects as traces of love past and to come, imagining the ubiquity of sex, and giving it to us in impossible terms. Love itself, then, is not just the culmination of all of these things, but the feeling of it all.

(500) Days gives us real situations and punctuates them with absurdities to better explain the current of emotions running through a 500-day-long friendship. We see the joy of first acceptance through a musical song and dance sequence set to Hall & Oates' "You Make My Dreams" involving some early-era Disney animation. We see a lover's tiff followed by our protagonist (the exceptional Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sitting alone in a theater watching himself star in an absurdist French art film. One scene shows us the events of a party in split-screen with the perfect, idealized expectation of the evening on one half and the reality of the situation on the other.

Right from the get-go, the film jumps around to different points in this couple's relationship, back and forth, and it maintains that throughout. This shows us that the movie we're watching is a reflection on the relationship as remembered by Levitt (and that is hinted at in other ways as well), but it also suggests that we know enough about love and relationships to understand such an out-of-time plot, that such things are ingrained in us as humans.

Levitt and Zooey Deschanel have real chemistry, even when they hate each other, even when they don't understand each others' actions, and their love is never fully explained. It's an honest movie that deals with love in all of its craziness and fury, and it's honestly funny. It's funny because it's true.

It's not a perfect movie, but it comes damn close.

It suffers from a mild case of Precocious Little Girl Syndrome, though nowhere near as badly as other films like Little Miss Sunshine. I tried to see Levitt's wise-beyond-her-years little sister as another surreal aspect of the film (which may have been the intent), but it was too much of a stretch for me. This is just one trope I'll probably never get over.

The final scene of the movie introduces a new character and some new possibility for Levitt, but we don't need to see it. The movie would be better off by scrapping this scene entirely and leaving us hanging on the conversation on the park bench. You'll know what I'm talking about when you see it, and you definitely should.

While (500) Days of Summer doesn't get an absolute top-notch score from me, I'm still comfortable putting it in the pantheon of romance movies and romantic comedies, right up there next to Lost in Translation, Amelie, Love, Actually, and, yes, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. See this movie at your first opportunity, and if you can, see it with someone you love.

DRM

2010-04-16T11:51:00.006-05:00

It doesn't even have a nice ring to it. Go on. Say it out loud. "D. R. M." Yuck.

It also leaves a bad taste in your mouth, but not because of how it sounds. Because of what it is.

I realized today that if I had to explain it to my parents, I probably wouldn't be able to do so without bias creeping in. Yes, I hate DRM. Passionately. Yes, there are two sides to the story. It's just that one of those sides is really hard for me to understand because I'm not a billionaire trying to retain profits indefinitely. I'm a lower-middle class consumer in search of culture.

I also realized that if I were to explain DRM to my parents, a certain zeal would slip into my tone, and I would probably sound like a raving lunatic or a Manhattan street preacher or Tom Cruise (who, in a way, is kind of both).

The best I can do, I think, is write what I know and let zeal come. The zeal is passion, and passion can go a long way to proving a point.

This is what I know.

I know that I'm late to the game.

I know people have complained about DRM for longer than I have. I know I complained about DRM long before I wrote this blog post. I know that Jack Valenti was more of a zealot in the 80's when he was president of the MPAA than I am now, but for the other team. After all, he's the one who said this of the VCR:

We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine. ... I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

Fortunately, that puts him in a light far more radical than the one this writing puts me in, which is at least something to my credit.

The point is that the guys arguing against me (and millions of other DRM-haters) are being very dramatic in order to skew the way the market thinks about morality in terms of art consumption. It amounts to willful ignorance, which makes for bad business.

I know that CDs are old technology

I know music has been sold on CDs since 1982. I know that the CD spec was defined before DRM was even a conversation. But I also know, thanks to the likes of Jack Valenti, that the core idea behind DRM was being discussed even then, and I know that core concept is control for profit.

It would seem that the MPAA and the RIAA and a few other lobbyist organizations see digital media, personal computers, and the Internet as a Trifecta of Doom affecting their industry. In a way, they're right. I'll come back to this later, but it's worth noting now that I'm not a fan of the concept that culture should be sacrificed for the sake of continued profits.

Digital media was popular in the form of audio CDs before the personal computer was popular, and the PC was popular before the Internet was (though the idea of a large-scale computer network was actualized decades before its mainstream use). When the Internet hit big, it completed this deadly combo attack that goes like this:

Buy a CD.
Rip the CD to a PC.
Share the music online.

Once shared, the music could be shared over and over and over again at no cost, and the CD was only ever purchased by one buyer. That's not entirely true, as CDs are regularly purchased by many buyers even to this day, but that was the fear. Supposedly, the music industry has seen marked decreases in sales, which they attribute to the Trifecta.

In an attempt to resolve this trouble, they invented Digital Rights Management systems in an attempt at managing their rights to digital media. That's what they tell us.

It doesn't work.

I know about DRM servers.

I know that when I buy music from an online music store, I'm likely going to have to register an account, and I know I'm probably going to have to use some special software to purchase the music, and I know that I'm going to have to log in every thirty days or so to let the vendor know I'm still alive and wanting to listen to music or else my songs will get scrambled.

I know about playback lock-in. When I buy music in certain vendors' stores, I'm going to have to pay for the music and pay for a specific piece of hardware like a Zune to continue to play it. I know that sometimes these stores take my motherboard's or CPU's serial number (or that of some other ideally permanent hardware component) from my PC, and I will have to use that to authenticate my music in the future lest my music be destroyed.

I know about vendor lock-in. When I use certain services like Rhapsody, I'm going to get a really good deal by downloading as much music as I want for a flat monthly fee (Rhapsody charges $9.99 per month), but also that the music I download is going to be in a format that only the Rhapsody software and compatible media devices can decode. I know that if I want to use the old trick of burning to a CD and then ripping it back to my PC to strip the music of this format and DRM, I'm going to pay an additional 99 cents per track.

And I know that all of this is bad business.

If I have to authenticate with account credentials, it's not much of a hassle. But if I take a long vacation or if I go without Internet access for an extended period of time, my music will be rendered unplaybale through no fault of my own. At least when I buy a CD, I don't have to worry about this.

If I have to use hardware serial numbers or a specific device to listen to my music, then the music's playability is dependent on my hardware's life. The average computer component's lifespan is significantly lower than a human's lifespan, so it's very likely that such a system will destroy my music before I decide to stop listening to it.

And a monthly payment system like Rhapsody? Nothing shows off how bad the business is quite like a system where the more you put in the less you get out.

All of this stuff is done in an attempt to retain a market and a profit, but it simply doesn't work that way, and the RIAA can't expect it to when they only make business decisions that restrict what their market is allowed to do. They can't expect to control digital information in a world where digital information is freely copied. And they can't expect their patronage to return when they intentionally demonize it with hate speech.

I know that digital piracy is not actually piracy.

If I have an apple and you don't, and then you take my apple away from me when I'm not looking, now you have an apple and I don't, and you have stolen it from me. You are a thief. And if you do this while shouting, "Yeaarrgh, mateys!" then you are a pirate.

If I have a digital song and you don't, and I offer it to you, then you take it, now you have a digital song, and I still have a digital song. You haven't stolen anything because I offered it to you in the first place, and also because you haven't taken anything from me. You've made a copy of the song. Together, we've effectively created more content. It's not theft, you are not a thief, and nobody has committed an act of piracy.

Despite this, however, every DVD you buy comes with a mandatorily viewed advertisement asking you if you would steal a TV. Would you steal a car? Would you steal your neighbor's grandmother's luggage? No, because you are a good, decent human being. So why would you steal music?

The control issue has turned into a war waged between corporations and consumers. DRM is without a doubt the weapon of the corporations, and so is slander. By using terms like "pirate" and "steal" to mean "copying" and "reducing our market opportunity" is nothing more than a blatant attempt at swerving popular opinion in their favor. And for all of this, they still can't seem to figure out that by waging a war on their own customers, they are actively reducing customer loyalty by the millions.

The truth is that people don't commit the heinous, despicable act of file sharing because they have ill intent or because they are trying to drive nails into the RIAA's coffin or because they're just bad people. They're doing it because file sharing is a free service that provides them with more of a better product, while purchasing DRM-laced music is more expensive, more difficult to maintain, and is restrictive in all the ways listed above and more.

There is no downside. Or there wasn't until the RIAA and MPAA lobbied for its illegality. So now they can sue you and charge you with a federal criminal offense. You can be jailed for copying music in these United States of America, land of the free and home of the rich, white music producers. So there's the downside. Fortunately, technology has outraced the haters, so it's difficult to be caught if you know what you're doing. That doesn't stop them from creating more rules, more tactics, and more restrictions. But these are not the things the DRM implementors should be concerned with. Rather, they should be asking themselves far simpler, more serious, more relevant questions.

Why would a consumer purchase a product when they could get a superior equivalent for free?

Why would a consumer purchase a product from a company who treats their potential customers as though they are criminals?

Why would a consumer purchase a product from a company who demands that their customers continuously prove that they did, in fact, purchase the product, or worse, to continually purchase the product over and over and over, time and time again?

The problem is plain to see. The media corporations want more control over their media than what consumers are willing to allow. In this sense, what some call "piracy" is nothing more than a market defining the way it wants the market to work, while the media corporations constantly laugh in the faces of their consumer base while rubbing their fingers together in a "pay up" gesture.

I know the Trifecta of Doom is real.

But I also know that it doesn't stand to destroy what the lobbyists claim it stands to destroy. The industries of music and film are not doomed, only their top-down corporate control. This is because technology has come to a point of capactiy, availability, useability, and affordability such that anybody can actualize the art of music or cinema.

Look at music.

I can purchase a basic line-in recording kit, quality sound card, and all the requisite software for music production and manage a studio-quality album using the computer I already own. This can be done with a desktop or laptop, and it probably won't be long before our phones are capable of it as well.

I can create a website and purchase a host inexpensively, host my music in the form of a torrent and throw a file on my website that is less than 1 KB in size, and get instant free distribution of my music without spending money on my own bandwidth. It's free and legal assuming I release the music under some kind of less restrictive license like many of those found in the Creative Commons licence package. I can accept donations from people who like the music enough to pay for it, and they have full understanding that when they pay for the music, all of that money will go directly to the artist and will support the production of future music.

That sounds radical. Absolutely ridiculous.

But it's not.

I know about Cory Doctorow.

If you've ever read any of Cory Doctorow's non-fiction, you'll know he's maybe the biggest advocate of free content out there. He's also a well-known science fiction author. His novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a legend among geeks. And you can read it for free in no less than 36 different formats. Of those formats, 34 were prepared by dedicated fans who wanted a way to consume the content on a specific device or in a specific format. Some formats are popular and more or less universal, such as the PDF and plaintext versions. Some are quite obscure, like an LBR file for Libris, a Java-based ebook application for mobile devices.

Or you can buy the book in a store. You can pay money because his publisher, Tor books, understands the rights that everybody retains when a Creative Commons license is employed. They can even let the fans translate the novel into strange languages (such as the Slovakian version available online) and turn around and publish that. It works out for everybody. Tor books still exists as an industry leader for science fiction publications, but they let go of control. As a result, the content has burst out in every direction at once, Cory Doctorow is getting his books read by a much larger audience, and everyone still makes money when the book is purchased.

This proves the point that completely open and unregulated content can still produce money for major corporations and can still produce careers for creators of content.

I know about Joel Watson.

Joel Watson draws the popular web comic Hijinks Ensue. He also writes blog posts to accompany the strips and produces an entertaining podcast. He gives it away for free. He retains some premium content in "The Vault" that can be accessed for the price of a donation.

In the blog and podcasts, he often refers to the comic as "the experiment". He wanted to know if he could make an independent business like this work. He's given full transparency to the way it operates by letting readers and listeners know that writing comics is his job. Donations are not mandatory, but if a reader wants to continue reading, Joel needs to be paid. He's not syndicated, but his comic is very good. I would miss it from my RSS aggregator if it were to disappear. So readers buy books and T-shirts and donate money to gain access to the vault and while Joel is by no means a millionaire, he gets to do what he's passionate about while still putting food on his family's table.

This proves that a completely transparent operation where the major corporations are completely cut out is an entirely feasible buisiness model for an independent creator of content.

I know that still sounds radical.

I know that what I've just said is basically that everyone must either give away their content for free or run a fully independent business with their content. It also means that people who produce quality content will receive good payment without a distributor taking a slice of it. When you buy a CD for $17 at Best Buy, the artist sees perhaps a full dollar. When you buy an album directly from an independent artist's web page for $5, the artist earns a full $5. You as a consumer spend less and the artist makes more.

And then the artist can hold concerts at $10 per ticket, from which he makes significantly more than he would from a CD sale assuming people show up. And he can sell T-shirts at the concert and on his web page and on Amazon and on Cafe Press and earn some more cash that way. Some of these outsourced services may skim some money off the top, but the bulk of it ends up as profit for the artist.

In other words, once control is gone, the Trifecta of Doom ends up benefitting everyone involved.

The Trifecta is seen as a crisis to the RIAA and MPAA and others, but in every crisis, there is an opportunity. The VCR was initially labeled a serial killer, but in the end, it opened up the entire home video market, video rental market, and it paved the way for people to be creative on their own or just film their family vacation. Likewise, I think the Trifecta of Doom may someday be seen for what it really is: a way to open technology to the next step in culture, art, and, yes, even business.

I do have one fear, however. I fear that the recording and film industries as they exist today may not survive, at least not in the same way they survive today. This is not because of the way that the Trifecta operates, but rather the way they see the Trifecta and have acted against it. By implementing DRM, they have destroyed their own customer loyalty. Turns out the Trifecta has not nailed their coffin shut. The industry has nailed it shut upon themselves. With all that loyalty gone, with all the distrust in the market, it seems they may never win back their customer base.

I wish them the best of luck, honestly. But they need to stop telling us when, where, and how we may consume the content that we are paying for. It really is that simple.

Book Review: God's Plans for Your Finances by Dwight Nichols

2010-03-31T20:16:00.003-05:00

I was in my local grocery the other day and saw this book sitting on a shelf mixed in with all the other religious bindings:

And I'd like to use this particular book to exemplify a couple points.

First, God wants your money. He's an omnipotent and omnicient being who should probably realize that in the realm of Heaven, money is unimportant and only symbolic of an Earthbound wealth. As any Christian will tell you, true wealth is the reward which awaits Christians in the afterlife and the security that Christ's love brings you during your time on Earth. But He wants your money nonetheless for purposes that aren't spelled out in the Bible.

Second, Christians will buy anything if you nail it to a cross. That's not meant to be taken literally, of course. What I mean is that if you make something appear sufficiently Christian, then you're almost guaranteed to turn a profit if you put it up for sale.

I looked up the book on Amazon and was treated to a few pages of the book. We'll start with the table of contents.

This suggests that by reading the book, I will learn that God has a plan for my money. That's my Economic Destiny™. Also, I will have some trouble attaining my Economic Destiny™, as evidenced by chapters such as "The Key to Success with God" and "Planning and Preparation". Debt is "bondage" that, with careful consideration and (most of all) faith, will become "God's Supernatural Increase".

Naturally, I find problems with this, and I haven't even started the text. See, a destiny is something that is bound to happen to you or which you are bound to do. In classical literature (much of which predates the time of Christ), people bound to a destiny tried to avoid it, but ended up fucking their mothers and killing their fathers anyway through a process called self-fulfilling prophecy.

Furthermore, this book's chapters range from the highly religious (Faith for God's Supernatural Increase, The Foundation of All God's Blessings, Opening the Windows of Heaven) to the seemingly secular (Eliminating Waste, Saving Money on Insurance). How contradictory that these things be intermingled. It seems like you could write a book about saving money, avoiding debt, and spending wisely without involving religion at all.

And yet this book undoubtedly exists.

So let's go to the first chapter, shall we?

Allow me to summarize with some common sense.

Jan is a single parent with two kids who can't make it on what she makes. The narrator asks her if she's asked God for guidance. She affirms that she has, but nothing has changed because prayer is scientifically proven to not produce reliable, positive results under any circumstances.

Jan admits that even when she removes God from the equation and tries to genuinely budget her money, she fails because she does not earn enough to budget and save, thus proving that God never had anything to do with her situation or her wealth in the first place, and that the prayer, as I stated before, was totally ineffective.

But "Jan is a committed Christian and genuinely loves the Lord. Nevertheless, she is trapped by the system" and even though she wants to give some of her money to God, she has to put her own bills first. And that's a big part of the first point, you know. God wants your money so bad that he convinces you not only to give it up, but to want to give it up.

The narrator makes an astute observation. If God wanted Jan to have money, God, in all his omnipotence, would have made it happen. Unless God doesn't exist or He exists in a way contrary to Christian teachings. Ever more astute, the narrator also says that if Jan doesn't do something about her finances herself, they're never going to get better.

That's right! God isn't going to help her! She has to do it on her own. It's a secular idea presented in religious form. And that brings me to my second point. This book is for sale and probably selling because the word God is printed in 620-point font on the cover. This book is profitable because it outlines God's plan for your money. This book is making money for its author and publishers because it has been nailed to a cross.

So who is this Dwight Nichols guy? Let's look at the copyright page.

Aha! He works for Urban Impact Ministries. And who are they? Let's have a look at their website.

They're building neighborhoods for Jesus! And kids.

But don't let that fool you. See those big words in the lower-left?

Donate Now

Where do we go when we click said link?

Straight to the Secure ~~Giving Your Money to God~~ Donation Form. It's so easy to give God your money.

I haven't read the full book yet, but based on the thesis chapter which I read on Amazon and quoted above, I can safely assume it's about being frugal and spending wisely so that you always have extra money to give to God. To tell people that the point of being sensical with money is to have spare cash to donate to the omnipotent being who could have given you money but didn't is not only contradictory, but dishonest.

I hate Dwight Nichols.

In defense of Texas school curriculum changes

2010-03-19T23:40:00.002-05:00

There's been a lot of uproar lately about the changes the Texas Board of Education has been making to the state's social studies curriculum. NPR's angry, ThinkProgress.org is angry, the New York Times is angry, the Washington Post is angry... Everybody's angry!

But take heed, ladies and gentlemen! All of these purported news sources expressing anger are all socialist liberal rags! The conservative values our society so desperately needs are being trampled upon in our education system and when we finally have a chance to fix it, we are lambasted by the very critics who seek to destroy those values.

We knew it was coming. It was inevitable. The liberals control the media, and it's understandable that they would make a row over this, considering that destroying our children through indoctrination at the most basic levels is the largest item on their agenda. After all, how can they take control of the minds of future generations if they don't start early by filling their brains with harmful lessons of the past?

So inevitable was it that the board members I elected were afraid to make known our ultimate goal. After all, if we had revealed the master plan during its execution, it would have failed. So the board members got away with what they could get away with, and we'll move forward in future years to create a bright and intelligent tomorrow.

Want to know how? Want me to reveal the secret plan? Want a perfect example of it? ThinkProgress.org writes,

"The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, 'replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.' "

Can't you see how this is beneficial? We must stop teaching disgusting Jeffersonian lies like "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine," and start instilling important Calvinistic values like "For there is no one so great or mighty that he can avoid the misery that will rise up against him when he resists and strives against God."

First, the textbooks need to be rewritten to reflect these absolute truths known to every good Christian. It is a flawed first step because we should definitely not be handing any kind of intentionally revised content to our children. No, we owe the next generation of leaders more than that. We owe them the logical next step — to remove the textbooks entirely. Everyone knows that the only book our children need to be reading in grades K-12 is the King James Bible.

Our elite elected educators managed to get this far under the logic (which should be obvious, really) that Thomas Jefferson's ideas were only the summaries of other, greater philosophers who came long before him. People like John Calvin. And this, gentle readers, is the true backbone of this revolution. By continuing to enforce this logic through curriculum changes, we can win back the minds of our children.

For instance, everybody knows that physics is simply applied mathematics. Our students don't need to know anything about physics or the way the "natural" world works. That might lead them to other disturbing thoughts which are already being crammed into their unsuspecting little heads such as this "plate tectonics" nastiness our students are being brainwashed with, or the ludicrous thought that the earth is generally spherical, or worse, the destructive fabrication that the earth revolves around the sun.

The state of science textbooks these days is as deplorable as the state of social studies and history textbooks, but the solution is the same. By continuing to follow the logic of returning to the infallible basics, by going to the very root of human knowledge, by replacing summaries of long prior experiences with the original experiences themselves, we can regain control even of the sciences. And the source of this solution remains the same as well. The King James Bible will tell our students in the plain English that Jesus himself used everything they need to know about how the world works.

Gentle readers, this is the solution to all of the problems taking root in our education system.

School lunches are too expensive and not nutritious enough, but the Bible tells us that we are made better people through fasting in God's name. Problem solved.
There are too few teachers to impart this information, but the state of the rightful Christianity today suggests that millions can learn from Jesus simultaneously. Problem solved.
Standardized testing is too rigorous and the statistics which come from it are not telling enough for us to make conscious and rational decisions about how to fund schools and educate children, but the Bible tells us about tests of faith and how these are the only tests that anybody should have to undertake to prove their worth in the world, since gaining entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven is the ultimate life goal. Problem also solved.

If we continue making the changes we've started making, we can return our students' education back into something worthwhile instead of the filth the dirty liberals have been shovelling upon them. I can help and so can you by continuing to elect Republican members to the Texas State Board of Education. Let them know that you entrust the Republican party to bring Christ's love and message of Divine Truth back into our schools. Write your congressman today!

Irreversible

2010-02-26T15:30:00.006-06:00

Warning: Here There Be Spoilers

Irréversible is shocking, brutal, and graphic. It's disturbing and shocking to anyone who doesn't regularly watch snuff films and rape porn. But there's a beauty and truth in it, and after watching the film for the second time, I think I'm ready to comment on that.

The story told is relatively straightforward.

Alex, while reading in a park, surrounded by children playing in a sprinkler, realizes she's late. She may be pregnant.

The next day she stays in bed late making love to Marcus. They're a happy couple deeply in love. They're headed to a party this evening, so Marcus heads to the liquor store, leaving Alex behind to shower. After her shower, she takes a home pregnancy test, which comes out positive.

They ride the subway to the party with their friend Pierre. Pierre used to date Alex, and they discuss Pierre's apparent inability to make Alex orgasm and Marcus's apparent ease at that duty.

At the party, Alex goes off dancing with other friends while Pierre and Marcus discuss Pierre's loneliness and lack of recent sexual activity. Marcus attempts to loosen Pierre up. Marcus is drinking heavily and doing cocaine while Pierre refuses the stuff. Marcus tries to get Pierre to have a good time, but Pierre is very uptight and set in his ways.

Alex is angry that Marcus is acting immaturely. This anger is most likely a result of hormones and the realization that she is now pregnant with Marcus's child, and even during their squabble, she doesn't tell Marcus that the pregnancy is for sure. She leaves the party in a huff to go home and rest.

At a busy street crossing, a prostitute tells Alex to take the underground crossway instead of walking the crosswalk on the street because it's safer. Underground, Alex witnesses a man acting violently toward a woman walking with him. Alex intervenes.

The man lets the woman go and focuses on Alex instead. He procedes to rape her anally during an excruciating 10-minute single shot, then kicks and pounds her face in until she's in a coma.

Marcus and Pierre leave the party to find police and ambulances all around. They're told to stay back, but when Marcus sees his love's face smashed and covered in blood, he is devastated. A nearby street thug offers up the possibility of revenge, and Marcus and Pierre go on a journey through seedy Paris streets attacking hookers and heroin addicts to find the rapist, Guillermo Nunez, known as "The Tenia" (The Tapeworm). Pierre tries to convince Marcus to give up the search and revenge plot.

The journey leads them to a gay sex club called "The Rectum". Pierre pleads once more with Marcus to give it up, but Marcus refuses. He runs through the labyrinthine hallways of the club, passing men having sex (oral, anal, and just about any other way you can think of) with each other, asking (and sometimes begging) for Marcus to give them head and to fist them.

One man continues to beg Marcus to fist him, saying, "Sure you wanna see the Tenia? Fist me instead! Fist me, it's safer!" The disturbing thing is that he's right. Under threat of violence, the man leads Marcus on until they get in a fistfight. Marcus is thrown to the floor, while a man kneels on his elbow and shatters his arm backward. With Marcus unable to move due to the pain and his destroyed arm, the man begins to anally rape Marcus.

But Pierre is not far behind, and he knocks the man over with a fire extinguisher. He pounds the man's face in the with the fire extinguisher until the man is dead and his head no longer resembles a head so much as a pile of red matter.

The Tenia is never found, the wrong man dies, the protagonist (if you can call him that) is left injured and headed to the hospital, and Alex's rape is never avenged.

Two older men hold a conversation in a nearby apartment over the sounds of the sirens. The subject of this conversation is one of utmost importance to the movie.

But the audience doesn't get the benefit of seeing the film in the chronological order as it has been described here. No, we watch it backwards. We start with the two men talking, proceed to the scene in The Rectum, take a backwards journey down Paris backstreets, finding more out about the situation as we go. Then Alex gets raped, we go back to a party, then see Marcus and Alex make love in the middle of the day, and finally learn of her pregnancy. We start with a climax and move rapidly toward a peaceful, but painfully ironic finish.

·

That opening conversation is held between two men who never appear in the rest of the movie. They are completely tangential to the plot, and this conversation appears to be non sequitur to the story. However, the conversation is pivotal to understanding the rest of the film.

One man in his early sixties sitting on a bed, naked except for his underwear tells another man, fully dressed, twenty years younger, and chain smoking, that "Time destroys all things." When pressed, he confides that he did time for having sex with his daughter.

The chain smoking man responds, "Ah, the Western syndrome!"

The Western syndrome. That's what this movie is about. But what is it?

It's about civilization, advancement, society. We're told that we should act a certain way, perceive events a certain way, interpret all things a certain way because that's what society tells us. But it's an illusion brought on by this affliction they call "the Western syndrome".

The chain smoking man suggests that "We all think we're Mephisto." Mephistopholes is the demon character in Faust who attempts to convince a man that he could possibly want to live. This man is suggesting that we all have some entitlement to life or pleasure or control over either thing. "We fuck up and they say it's bad news. It's tragic. Can't forget the pleasure, the joy. There are no bad deeds, just deeds."

The film takes this idea and runs with it by breaking every convention you ever thought you held about the way films should be made, beginning with the very scene in which the concept is brought up.

For instance, there is no clear reason why the old man is nude. It's a safe assumption that these two aren't gay; they haven't been having sex. The old man refers to the homosexuals in the club downstaris as "fruitcakes," a mild slur against the homosexuals. The chain smoking younger man isn't at all perturbed or bothered by the old man's nudity, and it doesn't even seem like they know each other very well. But all the same, they're holding a philosophical conversation, one of them naked and unattractive. This is something that simply doesn't take place in movies. It's a break in that convention.

So is the constantly-moving, spiraling, swerving, and sometimes nauseating cinematography.

So is the next scene where Marcus travels deep into the bowels of The Rectum. Naked men surround him. Many are masturbating. Most are having anal sex. A few are engaged in oral sex. The sounds of a whip followed by screams and groans permeate the glowing, murky air. One man undergoes nipple torture. Men are piled atop each other in awkward sexual positions. A completely naked man serves drinks behind a bar doused in red light. There is a constant moaning sound as if the building itself is in the throes a violent orgasm. When Marcus asks a nude youth if he knows the Tenia, the response is simply, "Suck me." A different man with a moustache responds to the same question, "You suck my big cock?" And then there's the man begging to be fisted. He shoves a few fingers into his anus and says, "The Tenia'll shove both arms up your ass! You'll be squealing!" The scene culminates in a man's face completely bashed in by a fire extinguisher.

It's all very pornographic, yet we're expected to see it as art. Another convention broken. Yes, I would say this is a pornographic movie, but I would not call it pornography.

Throughout the rest of the movie, women are beaten up, slapped, punched, treated with general disrespect, and called "whores". A Chinese taxi driver is pulled out of his own taxi, beaten, and sprayed with his own mace. In the narrative, this is all done in the name of revenge. Thematically, it's done to destroy the way you thought a movie could be made in terms of content. Most of us don't stand for these things. We would never commit rape, assault a person, take part in an underground sex club, flat-out destroy a man's cranium, and yet the movie expects us to simply accept these brutalities as part of a story. Even the way the story is told in reverse order is somewhat against convention (though not unheard of; see Memento or almost anything Quentin Tarantino has done). The backwards order is intentional, and later in the movie, it becomes particularly poignant. In a way, it's even a slight break in the fourth wall.

The rape scene in particular hints at this last notion. We follow Alex down a ramp into the blood-red underground crossway steadicam-style. But when she gets raped, we stop moving. We settle down to the floor and watch up close as her attacker first strips her, then penetrates her. For minutes, she cries and screams through her smothered maw, arm outstretched to the camera as if begging the audience to do something.

But we don't. We don't intervene at all. And when a man walks across the pathway at the end of the hall and sees the scene, neither does he. He simply runs away. Is this what society tells us to do? Run at the sight of trouble? There is no doubt that this is a rape. There can be no confusion. This is clearly not just two people having random anal sex on the floor of an underground tunnel. It is horrifying, terrible rape. Yet nobody does anything.

We don't even move until after he kicks her in the face and spine, then grabs her by the hair to repeatedly smash her face into the concrete floor, and even then, it's only to get a better look.

This is the first part of the way that director Gaspar Noé challenges "the Western syndrome." Every quality we have as human beings says that we're watching events that should never take place. We're witnessing the worst of the worst of the worst. This is more than just watching some torture porn flick like Hostel or the Saw sequels. This is real stuff. We can't cast it aside as just horror fiction because we know that things like brutal rape happen all the time. The audience is being challenged to stop simply acknowledging that this brutality exists, but to witness it firsthand, to see that there is nothing we can do to stop it, and that even if we could, we might decide not to.

No, do not mistake this as torture porn. This is not that. This is some twisted form of reality that we're being made to sit through so that we can understand this ailment that afflicts civilization: that we have moral standards which are sometimes made law, but that in reality, the laws make no difference because the damage is done by the time the law can take affect. The laws, then, are meaningless. They save no one.

·

This rape scene is the last scene of gratuitous violence you'll see in the film. Thus begins the second part of the Western syndrome challenge.

Our entitlement to life and pleasure and bliss. Pierre and Marcus are at the party. Marcus lives it up with booze and coke and women. He and Pierre mock each other over their sexualities. There's a kinship here, despite what appears to be an age difference of five to ten years. Regarding Pierre's years of apparent celibacy, Marcus asks, "So what do you do with your willy?" and jokingly grabs Pierre's crotch. "You jack off? You go to hookers? You been alone for three years now."

Marcus tries to hook Pierre up, tries to convince Pierre to have the good time that he himself is having. Marcus is charming with the ladies. Pierre is awkward and abstinant. Marcus even offers up Alex (Marcus's girlfriend, formerly Pierre's) for a dance, which, despite a certain comfort level between them, Pierre declines.

But even Alex is critical of Marcus's good time, wondering, "How come you gotta take shit to get off?" She decides she's going to go home and rest, leaving Marcus to fill out his night.

And as she opens the door to the street, we the audience are faced with a certain panic. We know that it's this decision to leave at this exact instant that will lead to her rape, Marcus's plan for revenge, Marcus's rape, and the murder of an innocent man.

That's the second part of the challenge, see? Suddenly, we want to do what we couldn't do before. We watched her get raped, but we didn't want to get involved. We were, for some reason, afraid for our own lives. It was selfish and devastating. But now, as we watch her make a seemingly harmless decision and knowing how harmful it really is, it seems so easy to just screm, "No, Alex, don't leave!" We want to explain to her everything that will happen by this casual decision. We want to intervene.

But we can't.

Isn't that strange? If we could tell the future, the decisions that we make would be different. The amount of effort we would go through to save a life would change. We'd know all the right words to say at all the right times.

We can't see the future. Not under ordinary circumstances. But here, in the frame of this movie, we do. And we wish we couldn't. Irréversible would be a much easier film to watch if it were told from start to finish, but we're given a glimpse into the terrible future, and we're forced to pay the consequence of anguish for it. Thus, our concepts of what life is, what pleasure is, what bliss is, are thrown in our faces.

From here on out, the more we watch, the more irony we percieve and the more we realize that nobody is entitled to any of these things. These people on screen — Marcus and Alex and Pierre — are good people, and we would love nothing more than to know that they will all be happy together forever. But they, like us, are not entitled to that fate. No, these three are forever bound by torment, pain, distress.

The three of them in the subway landing, huddled comfortably together, discuss a book which Alex has been reading. It says that the future is already written, and premonitory dreams prove it. With this conversation, we get a sort of reverse irony. We suspect that we will bear witness to some premonition before the film is over.

They discuss Pierre's inability to give Alex an orgasm. The reasoning Alex provides is that he thinks of it as a task, and doesn't get into it himself. Again we see this recurring theme of having fun and reaping rewards from it. And through it all, no one is offended. All three remain happy the whole time. We know they think they're entitled to life and love, but we already know they're wrong.

The pain of Irréversible's brand of irony is most poignant in the next scene, however, taking place the morning of Alex's rape.

The couple lies in bed naked, asleep, on top of each other. A phone call from Pierre wakes them up. Aside from that, the scene is quiet, serene, lit with warm yellows and oranges.

And, just as we suspected, Alex had a dream. She describes being in a red tunnel when suddenly the tunnel breaks in two. She thinks it's because her period's late.

They spend the morning in bliss. They discuss the possibility of her being pregnant. They kiss. Marcus decides that having a kid will be fun. He kisses her nipples, slides between her legs. He needs to go pick up some liquor for the party tonight before the store closes. They share a cigarette. She gets in the shower. He dresses.

They share a life much like any other couple shares a life. They're in love and they do mundane tasks. But for us, for the audience, it's all false. This is the last moment these two will share together in happiness. We know that they will go to the party with each other tonight, get angry, and then Alex will be raped, and then Marcus will seek revenge, and then he will be crippled, and the wrong man will be killed. We see all of this in every breath they take, in every mundane action, and we apply it to ourselves. What if today is the last day you will ever put pants on?

Marcus finds Alex in the shower, and they kiss through the shower curtain. They smile. And in that smile is held the deepest, saddest irony of all. We can't help but think that we'd rather have started the movie here and ended it here as well. We have too much knowledge of future events for us to share in this couple's moment of adoration.

But the director will not let us off the hook this early. Alex takes a pregnancy test and waits for the results. When they come in, it's pure elation. She's radiating with glee, and we must sit and be tortured by it.

Trig Palin and the Case Against Prayer

2010-01-19T23:40:00.000-06:00

The Scenario

I found this website the other day and had a laugh. The idea is simple:

On April 18th, 2010, Christian churches from around the country will all join together in simultaneous prayer to cure Sarah Palin's Down's Syndrome-afflicted son Trig. They believe that through true faith and mass prayer, Trig Palin will be rid of the genetic malfeasance that has rendered him feeble.

I am not sure if I can call Poe's Law on this. That is, it could very well be a parody done so incredibly well that it appears to be actual fundamentalism. There are blog posts with open comments, and enough posters seem to be in agreement that I'm inclined to believe that certain people believe Trig will be saved. This doesn't completely rule out Poe's Law, but it's enough to make me willing to continue with a thought exercise in response to it.

The Thought Exercise

Christian fundamentalists often speak of the power of prayer and claim that the Christian God answers prayers, but this is easily shown to be false. All you really have to do is stop and think for a moment.

Case 1: God answers all prayers

If we assume that God answers all prayers by all Christians, then the concept of free will is more than just dissipated. It's more than predestination. Instead, our actions are mostly the will of other humans. In such an existence where all human wishes are granted for everybody by an omnipotent controlling power, then I could make you lift your right arm, run a mile, have a heart attack, or engage in autoerotic asphyxiation just by praying to God.

Since we obviously all make choices on our own, God cannot possibly answer all prayers by all people. I'm fairly sure many Christians are praying for me to stop being so darned atheistic, yet here I am, still an atheist.

Case 2: God answers prayers for the devout

Perhaps God only makes prayers come true when the prayers come from the truly devout, sincere Christians. In this case, God's omnipotence enlightens Him to make the correct choices as to which prayers should be responded to.

Surely at least one of the millions praying for the cure to my atheism must be in some way faithful or devout enough to warrant God's attention. Even if not, then some prayer of the devout (like those fire and brimstone types who pray for death and destruction) must have come true at some point. And yet the only prayers I ever hear of coming true are the miraculous happenings of otherwise explainable events.

If a devout person prays for his son to arrive home from college safely and that son arrives without a scratch, is this the answer to a prayer? Or is it really just that the son was a safe driver and practiced safe driving techniques?

Case 3: God answers only "good" prayers

Again we dive into the realm of divine arbitration. If God only answers prayers for things which He deems worthwhile, then the only point in prayer in the first place is to call attention to something which humans perceive as needing to happen. But if such a thing doesn't mesh with God's divine plan, then the prayer is wasted.

Figuring out what types of prayers God will answer is a trial and error situation, and an enormous waste of time. Look at us! It's been thousands of years since God sent his only begotten son to teach us a lesson or two (and even longer since God spoke with humans directly), and we still haven't been able to narrow down what prayers God wants to take action on and which He doesn't.

The Long and Short of It

Prayer doesn't work. That's it.

Prayer won't heal Trig Palin. What Trig Palin suffers from is something that developed before he was born and can never be cured. If we are to prevent Down's Syndrome, the focus must be on scientific study on the fetal development of genes.

I predict that on April 18th, tons of people across the nation will pray and pray and then pray even harder until finally, with a great final burst of effort, Trig Palin will remain largely unaffected. The folks involved will not bow down. They will not have a crisis of faith. They will not cease to believe in their God or the Power of Prayer ™. They will instead come up with what amounts to an excuse but which they will call a reason for their prayers to not be answered by God. Their faith will become stronger for whatever reason.

About the best they could realistically hope for (prayer is really just unrealistic hope with suspension of disbelief involved) is that Trig Palin might someday grow up to be about as smart as his mother.

Why I write a blog like this

2010-01-10T23:05:00.000-06:00

I conversed with a friend over this post. He said he read parts of it, but didn't see the point. He said that people who make arguments like the creationist argument therein and people who respond to them by explaining the gambler's fallacy are at opposite ends of the rationality spectrum. Neither will convince the other of his position.

Ever.

I get that. Really, I do. But it's not the point.

I'm not trying to convince anybody. I am well aware than anybody who reads this blog and agrees was more or less aligned with my commentary before they started.

No, these are just the ramblings of a dude with things on his mind. And when something effects me like this — creationism being taught as if it were science in public schools, meaning that my children, when they exist, will be put through a Christian curriculum — I feel the need to at least practice my right to free speech or press in defense against it. If my argument convinces anyone, that's awesome. If someone thinks it's worth the space it consumes on the Internet, that's cool, whether they started out in agreeance or dissent. If they think it's worth reposting and wasting duplicate space on the Internet, I'm totally fine with that.

But am I trying to convince anyone of anything?

No. I am not. Maybe I should be. But I am not. My words exist simply because I feel they must. It occupies my time and expresses my thought more permanently than just thinking them in the general direction of people I talk to on a regular basis.

I'm weird, and so is everyone else

2010-01-10T22:39:00.000-06:00

I went to pick up some Chinese food for dinner tonight. Let me set the stage for you.

I walk in. It's cold and dark outside, so the low, warm light and heat conditioned room are very comfortable. Smells of mingled citrus and ginger filter through the air to my nostrils. The wife and I eat at this restaurant all the time (and if you're ever in the vicinity of China Cafe in Austin next to the Alamo Drafthouse on 183 at Lake Creek Parkway, check it out — you won't regret it), so most of the staff is familiar to us, and we're familiar to them. So it's a very welcoming environment, and I can't imagine anybody walking out of there disappointed.

The Asian manager standing at the front counter says goodbye to a customer on the way out. Specifically, he says, "Thank you."

The customer responds, "You're welcome."

For some reason, I connote this as rudeness. Why?

Sure, I get it. The manager is thanking his customer for the patronage. The customer is giving an affirmative response. It makes sense. It's cordial.

So why did I think it was rude?

Probably because my typical response to a patronage "thank you" is, "Thanks!" In return for thanking me for patronage, I thank the person for the good food, service, and atmosphere. This may not be the case for everyone. Did this particular customer have a bad experience? Perhaps. It can't be unheard of.

I guess all I can say is that people are different. I'm probably more on the weird side of people than most others.

Creationism and the Gambler's Fallacy

2010-01-09T17:28:00.007-06:00

There's a thought process called the Gambler's Fallacy that occurs when the theoretical behavior of chance and probability become skewed in actuality, and an observer posits that since an event has happened more often than is probable that the opposite event is now more probable to take place.

For instance, if I have a fair coin and I flip it one hundred times, the coin should, in theory, come up heads very nearly fifty times and tails the rest of the time. On average, fifty percent of my coin tosses will be heads, and the remaining fifty percent of the time, tails will land up. That is, theoretically, a fair coin lands on heads one time in two since heads is one face on a two-faced, fair coin.

If I flip a fair coin ten times, and it comes up heads nine of those times, the Gambler's Fallacy says that tails is now more likely to come up. This is not true, however, because the idea of the 50/50 split on long series of coin tosses is a probablistic average of the probable outcome of any single coin toss. In other words, if I flip a coin x times, the theoretical possibility that I will flip heads (x/2) times is only an extrapolation of the theoretical possibility that for every single coin toss, heads has a one in two chance of appearing. My odds of flipping heads never increase or decrease. They are always one in two for every single coin toss. If nine of my ten coin tosses have come up heads, the eleventh coin toss still has a 50% chance of coming up heads regardless of the results so far in the series.

What does this have to do with anything?

I read an argument for creationism today that posited that intelligent life can't have been generated by the chance occurrance of energetic animation because the odds of that occurrance taking place is infinitesimally close to zero.

This is a very real example of the Gambler's Fallacy (and an infuriating one, mostly because this means that public schools in my state must now discuss creationism in science classes as though it were a viable scientific explanation for the existence of life on Earth). The fallacy happens because creationists are looking at the entire existence of the Earth as a single instance.

What's needed to create life? We don't know. But if the prevailing hypothesis is that it involves the presence of specific elements (oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, et cetera) and a significant amount of energy, then let's run with that. In fact, let's say that we need the amount of energy that comes packaged with a bolt of lightning.

So the chance that lightning should strike in a single place which contains all the chemicals which, once ignited, will create life is one in... How much? We don't know. And neither do the creationists. But still, let's just say to the creationists' benefit that the denominator is so incredibly huge that it makes the dividend inconceivably close to zero.

Scientific consensus puts the earth's age at roughly 4.6 billion years and says that life in its simplest form began 3.8 billion years ago. That's 800 million years that life took to form. The number of times lightning can strike in 800 million years becomes the length of our series. In other words, we have that many attempts at randomly creating life.

Our number — the total amount of times lightning can strike in 800 million years — is enormous. Though there's no way to tell at this point in scientific observation (and computational accuracy), I'd estimate that the number is significantly larger than the creationists' denominator for odds.

But it doesn't matter anyway. That's the Gambler's Fallacy.

If I have a fair six-sided die, I have an equal chance of rolling a three the first time I roll it as I do on the fifth time I roll it or the hundredth time or the nineteen billionth. Likewise, if a bolt of lightning has a one in 500 kazillion chance of creating life, then it has that same chance the first time it strikes and the twelfth time and so on. Therefore, by this logic, it is perfectly plausible that the first time lightning ever struck on Earth, it created life.

Yes, there are a lot of unknowns here. The biggest one is that we don't actually know exactly everything required to manufacture life. But the converse logic — that of the creationists — is preposterous. It works like this:

I was walking down the street today, and I saw a car's Texas State license plate. It was 7XP46A. There are six digits on a Texas license plate, each digit having thirty-six possible values. The odds of a plate receiving this exact ID are one in 2,176,782,336. The odds of that license plate being generated are so slim that the only possible reason for its existence is that God made it happen.

Bad Pun #1

2010-01-09T15:45:00.004-06:00

A homeless man tried to get my sympathy today by telling me a story of how his European car had broken down while he was on a cross-country drive to reunite with his long-lost family, leaving him stranded in a foreign city with no money. Unfortunately for him, I didn't buy into his Saab story.

The Age of Information Part Two - Video Killed the Radio Star

2009-12-13T16:17:00.001-06:00

If you want to read this article in style with some images, visit this site if it's online, which may not always be the case. This article is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.

We've always paid for the distribution method of art more than for the art itself. Even when literature was spoken by travelling performers, money was paid for the performance, and once heard, the art could be passed on. People still pay to read the contents of books. The book delivers the literature.

Technology has changed, and that's important. Technology provides leverage for life, making jobs easier to do, and cheaper. Gutenberg's device is a perfect example, and so is barbed wire. As technology moves forward, so do the distribution methods for literature. We find new ways to contain information and move product.

Books are now read on eReader devices such as Amazon's Kindle or the Barnes & Noble Nook. They're smaller than books and can hold far more words than any book could hope to contain. This is the power of technology put to its proper use.

With the development of technology has come new forms of art. As new media are created, artists inevitably find a constructive use for them. The art of photography developed out of an inventor's desire to permanently capture images of real life. This later developed into cinema, which combined forces with audio recording technology to create today's enormous movie business. Audio recording itself has spawned an entire industry of recording artists.

These industry leaders adapt books into movies. They record books on tape and CD. Musical recordings are used in films artistically and mechanically, to emphasize themes or emotions and to set a story's pace. Today we live in a world where mixed media is the norm rather than a novelty. Most significantly, there's an old medium being brought into new light, and it's combining with all of the other old media to create something both treacherous and amazing.

We call it the Internet.

The Internet has changed everything from the way we produce art to the way we distribute it and the way art business is run. Some leaders of the art industry are frightened by it. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are railing against it.

This is not a sudden or unexpected retaliation. In the 1970s, video killed the radio star and the MPAA put all the blame on VTR. Hollywood sold movies to television stations, who broadcast the films across the nation to millions of homes. But home viewers could now write the broadcast to a persistent medium — a video cassette — and watch it anytime they wanted. Commercials could be skipped through, so advertising was no good, and people could spend less time watching live broadcasts and more time watching what they wanted, provided it had been broadcast in the past. The MPAA's concern also lied in the thought that people might not go to theaters to see films, opting instead to wait till a television broadcast.

By the 1980s, US film companies had had enough. They wanted the infernal recording machines restricted. The MPAA raised concerns over copyright violations, and Universal Studios brought a court case against Sony (who produced the Betamax format of tape recording). Jack Valenti, then-president of the MPAA, made this famous statement on behalf of all studio members of the MPAA:

"We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine. ... I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

These strong and irrational words held little influence over the court's ruling. VCRs were determined to be legal for private consumption, a decision which solidified the technology in the market.

In the end, once forced to accept tape recording as a reality, the movie studios eventually embraced the format. They turned it into another form of revenue by selling customers video tapes with movies already on them in higher quality than what could be gained by recording TV signals. Again, the art of the film was encapsulated in a physical unit which could be distributed through a centralized supply chain, just like books were, and just like movie tickets were sold at box offices. The technology designed to be a benefit to people ended up being just that.

But take careful note of this situation. The MPAA was concerned about selling fewer units (theater tickets or film sales to broadcasting stations), but in court, they stated copyright concerns. They claimed that the concern was over intellectual property. Much discussion and debate has taken place over this topic in the decades gone by since VCR, and many opinions expressed. Mark Getty, founder of Getty Images (a large stock image company) said on the subject, "Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century."

And it appears he's right. The American movie industry earned $9.76 billion in 2008. Getty Images made $218 million in only the fourth quarter of 2006. These billionaire corporations know how to keep turning a profit, and that's to have a tight control over the intellectual property.

The Age of Information Part One - Manufacturing Ownership

2009-12-13T16:12:00.003-06:00

Long, long ago, in the days of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the days of Grendel and Sir Gawain, in the days of the Bible, performers travelled far and wide to recount fictional stories to audiences. The tales were for the taking. Listeners would recount the stories to others, and the stories were given a life of their own through this means of communication.

Stories were written by poets, but recited by travelling storytellers in prose. The oral narrative became part of the collective culture. If a story was to be put on paper or bound, it was with careful precision that a scribe would ink out the words. The act of transcription was an art in and of itself, and sometimes a sacred one. Scribe was a common job title for a monk. The finished product would be treasured and sometimes locked away for protection.

Then came Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. Movable type turned the fine art of transcription into a simpler, less laborious activity aided by machinery. This new technology was rejected at first (some accused Gutenberg of engaging in black magic), but the benefits (and the science) became obvious over time.

The invention of the printing press with movable type in 1454 introduced and enforced a very important concept: containment as a method of ownership and distribution.

To this day, printing companies pay authors for the right to publish literature. By putting literature into a book, the contents are encapsulated, made into somewhat immutable physical units. The units are then sold to consumers, and those revenues are paid to the printing companies and distributors. The cultural unit, the literature itself, is not for sale. The physical unit, the book which contains the literature, is.

This idea of setting up boundaries to create ownership is nothing new. The printing press allowed for it to happen to literature, but the concept appears throughout history in other forms as well.

In the old days of America, livestock was contained using traditional fences, but the wood and stone materials were far too costly to contain all of the cattle in any given region. Free-roaming livestock was a frequent sight and the property of nobody.

In 1873, Joseph Glidden manufactured the first popular barbed wire. It was cheap, fast, and required significantly less of the expensive and newly-antiquated fencing materials. Constructing a barbed wire fence was also far less labor-intensive. Now more fences could be constructed at a lower cost and a higher speed. Consequently, more livestock could be owned.

To analogize, livestock is to barbed wire fences in the American old west as literature is to books and Gutenberg's printing press in the 1400s.

In both cases, ownership is derived from creating a containment method. The most important thing about this is the word derived. Ownership is not inherent. It's an assumed byproduct of the creation of a boundary.

New Moon is Old Hat

2009-11-22T12:07:00.005-06:00

I was taken (dragged) to see New Moon last night.

To be fair, I went quietly. Not because I wanted to see the picture. No. Because I drag my wife to movies she has no interest in seeing all the time, and it's only fair that I reciprocate that once in a while. So I went. And I complained as little as possible.

I even tried to like the movie. Honestly, I did. I figured if I was going to sit in front of a screen while this movie played out for a little over two hours, I might as well try to like it in the interest of keeping myself entertained.

There's just not much to like. Plenty has been said about how Stephanie Meyer has destroyed centuries of lore regarding vampires and werewolves by making the vampires sparkly and making the werewolves able to transform in the middle of the day and on command, not just on the full moon, so I won't go into that. I also won't go into how the movie translated from the book because

I have never read the books, and don't intend to, and
I try to view the film adapations of books as different interpretations of the books, being that they're on a different medium.

Still, there isn't a single character that is of any interest at all. The heroes are not particularly heroic, nor are they anti-heroic. They stand around mumbling into each others' faces/chests/stomachs/hands the entire time about non-events that I can't care about, try as I might. The villians are not particularly villainous or menacing or frightening at all. Come to think of it, the story has no real villain. As a matter of fact, the story has no real plot.

The movie opens on people in class discussing Romeo and Juliet, a masterful play by the inimitable William Shakespeare which this film continues to mirror in ways that countless movies have done before. Bella Swan, the two-time World Lip Biting Competion champion is helplessly in love with Edward Cullen, the Master of Brooding and Poor Line Delivery. Bella desparately wants to become a vampire and join the world of the Cullen family because she fears that she will eventually grow old and die while her not-quite-lover continues on at the rotting old age of seventeen. Edward adamantly refuses, but Bella persists in a truly nagging way that might convince me, were I a vampire, to just kill her on the spot.

Eventually, Edward decides that the only way to resolve this dispute it to run away. To Italy. To see the Volturi, who are an ancient clan of vampires from whom Edward seeks advice. Specifically, he seeks Aro, who is like the high school guidance counselor of the vampire world.

Edward then disappears from the story, and is promptly replaced by Jacob Black, a character who we know from the trailers is a werewolf, but who doesn't even know himself until halfway through the movie. My biggest complaint about Twilight, the first film in this "saga", is that even though the audience knew Edward was a vampire from the first frame he came onscreen, we had to sit through an hour of plodding breathlessness for the reveal before the plot could move on. That aspect has trended into this second franchise installment, although this time, Jacob's discovery that he is a werewolf at least serves as an obvious metaphor for puberty.

Ah, puberty. We all remember those years. When all females became simpering idiots seeking X-Game type thrills to remember their long-lost loves and sixteen-year-old boys all developed perfect, hairless, supermodel builds. Really the only true part about this is that Jacob ends up lusting over Bella, and that turns into a massive part of the endless melodrama that is New Moon.

Literally nothing happens during the entire second act of the film. People cry and whine over each other through a boring and oft-told love story that largely mimics the events in Romeo and Juliet, and Jacob and his four friends walk around without shirts on like frat boys on the beach (or Chippendale dancers on a stage) until finally, one of the Cullen sisters arrives as a plot device to create a climax out of thin air.

Edward has apparently asked Aro, master of the Volturi, to destroy him because he simply can't live without Bella and he also can't live with her wanting to be a vampire. But Aro has convened with his peers, and they agree that Edward should not be allowed to be destroyed. Ah, the troubles of being a century-old emo kid. I should mention that all of these conversations and plot points that I've just described in this paragraph occur off-screen and the audience never gets to see them. They are explained in fifteen seconds of dialogue as Bella and Alice Cullen go from Forks, Washington to Venice, Italy in as much time as it takes to make a jump cut.

But Ed has a brilliant plan. He going to commit suicide. He's going to step into the streets of Italy on the day where the townsfolk celebrate the expulsion of all vampires from the city and take off his shirt. Yep. That's it. No, the sunlight on his bare torso isn't going to kill him. Because vampires in this series aren't in any way harmed by sunlight. The sunlight makes them sparkle. Very pretty. And what do a mob of people celebrating the death of vampires do when they see a sparkly dude with no shirt on? They'll kill him! So it's a genius plan.

Well, kinda. You see, decapitation is the only way to kill a vampire in this universe. Wooden stakes just don't cut it. So Ed's banking on somebody in this crowd decapitating him. Because most Europeans are wont to do that these days.

But because Alice "McGuffin" Cullen showed up just in the nick of time to get Bella out of Washington, Bella is able to keep Eddie-boy from committing suicide by glimmering. Yay! But Aro isn't too keen on it, and this somehow escalates into a vampire fistfight. The "good" guys win. Everyone goes home. The end.

There. I just summarized the entire movie for you, and it probably didn't take you ten minutes. Sure, I left a few things out (like the ridiculous screeches of physical pain that Bella emits in response to Edward's disappearance), but honestly, if they had cut out all of the long pauses between lines, the movie would have only run about half an hour anyway.

The movie is painful to watch, mostly because of the brutally obvious parallels between New Moon and Romeo and Juliet. Stephanie Meyer has managed to distill beautiful Shakespearean lyricism like

Romeo, O Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.

into intelligence-insulting equivalents like

But you're a vampire... *long pause*

The acting is terrible. There's not a more blunt way I could say that. It feels like you're watching a middle school play. The actors sometimes overpronounce their lines and usually mumble through them. When you hear their words, you hear them as if through a pillow, except for the rare occasion (usually in Jacob's lines) where it's as though a computer is reading back words using a text-to-speech application.

And then there's the deep-seated irony of the movie.

The stories, from what I hear, are supposed to be a tale about the virtues of chastity. I haven't read the books, but I can safely say that the "plot" centers around two warring factions of monsters — vampires and werewolves — who must suppress their various animal urges to survive. The Cullens suppress their species' basic need to consume blood while the werewolf clan suppresses their basic urge to kill vampires. The main characters from each clan must each suppress their desire for Bella. So it seems it could very easily turn into a drawn-out, money-making, bestselling abstinence lesson.

But at the same time that it appears to be a story against sex, Jacob rips off his entire shirt to attend to a mild cut on Bella's forehead, all the time smirking as if somewhere else on the set, someone is whistling and cajoling. The instant this happened, the entire theater I was in began to do just that. The film is very well aware that it actively promotes teenage sexual relationships throughout. Jacob runs shirtless in the rain for twenty-five percent of the film. Edward's dramatic suicide attempt is done without torso cover. At one point during his final fight scene, his robe falls open as he is headlocked, arched backward, washboard abs flexing with every breath. This is without a doubt a movie that tempts its mostly female audience with attractive men bearing muscles not commonly found in most men that the mostly female audience would ever encounter in real life. Yet at the same time, it's supposed to be promoting chastity. In fact, this concept is more than a great irony. It's a great hypocrisy.

The director, Chris Weitz, also shows complete disregard for the frame. What I mean is that every shot of the movie has the main character in perfect focus while nothing else on the screen is discernable. The background is constantly blurred beyond the point of recognition. When there is room in the frame to show the person to whom the in-focus character is staring at (not speaking, breathing heavily, trying hard not to bite her lip), that other character is nothing but a darkened silhouette. Mis en scene is completely ignored for the sake of making the movie easy to watch.

Stanley Kubrick never got anywhere by taking the setting out of the story. Ridley Scott is well-known for having masterful set designs. Chris Weitz is known for... Uh... The Golden Compass, which was a movie where most settings were digital, where the director had total creative control over set design because it wasn't even limited to reality, and with which I was 100% underwhelmed. I guess what I'm getting at is that Chris Weitz will forever be known to me as the guy who does nothing with a lot.

My wife informed me that this film rather closely and accurately followed the book, which leads me to believe that Weitz didn't have much to work with to begin with, but I'm not letting him off the hook. As the director, he is largely to blame for this film's total lack of quality. He's not completely to blame. After all, it was Stephanie Meyer who wrote what amounts to really bad fanfic bordering on really tame slashfic, but if you combine a bad story with bad actors and a bad director, you're going to get a bad movie.

Follow-Up: Fox News Isn't News, and Silence is Acknowledgment

2009-11-13T19:40:00.002-06:00

Read this first, second, and third.

I've waited eleven days since my last response (fifteen since the original email), and there has been no debate. None at all. Zero. Zilch.

Nobody wants to call me an evil liberal (that's how Republicans cuss). No one wants to help out the gentleman saying Obama is Hitler. Since the email, the House has passed a poorly-named health care reform bill (it's an insurance reform bill), and I suppose they forgot all about it.

If silence is consent, then it's also acknowledgment. Lack of debate is acceptance of a point. Any questions?

In conclusion, Fox News Channel is not a channel owned by Fox that produces news because I argued that point and nobody challenged it. Now can we all get over them and watch or listen to real news stations?

Experiment: Spam!

2009-11-04T12:53:00.003-06:00

I am going to run an experiment. This experiment requires absolutely no effort on my part.

I have had a Gmail account since Gmail required an invitation. The oldest email I have is dated October 15, 2004. The email is number 10,087 at the time of this writing. In all this time, Gmail has provided above average spam filtering, throwing unwanted solicitations straight into a special folder. It seems I have been getting more and more spam lately, though it's always filtered properly, and I usually delete it all every couple of days.

So now I'm not going to delete any spam email for 30 days. I deleted all spam email that came in before November 1, and I won't delete any more until after I've metered it on November 30. I'll probably do some mild statistical analysis on it, but not so much that I have to open them all and read them. I just wanna know dates and probably to see if more comes in on a particular day of the week than others.

Further Follow-Up: Fox News Isn't News Because Nobody Can Defend That It Is

2009-11-02T17:02:00.003-06:00

Before reading this post, read this one and then this one.

Just when I thought that nobody would make any further comment, I received this email (sent via Reply To All) from my great uncle in Maryland:

It gives me hope for the country to find out that there are intelligent people in Texas. I was ready to advocate that Texas be given back to Mexico. I will not watch the lies on fox on Sunday but will be glad to receive your report.

That's very flattering and all, but I sent a note back to him (not the entire group) which, some personal information and unrelated familial conversation aside, read:

I'd hardly call myself a strict liberal, and there are plenty of reasons to hold conservative values. What bothers me is the attitude of name-calling and baseless claim-shouting. Furthermore, it seems the moment that rational discussion is encouraged and the name-calling and moronic screaming is confronted with historical and imperical fact, the screamer runs away. If people would only do some research on topics, I'm sure we'd all be better off. I can only do that task for myself, it seems. This is not the first time I've hit Reply To All and countered these emails, and I'm not afraid or ashamed to do it, despite my wife's insistence that I keep it to myself.

I didn't respond to the group as a whole because it seemed like even my great uncle who (unbeknownst to me at the time) apparently harbors liberal idealogies had no intention to really weigh in with significant, relevant thought. I didn't want to derail the conversation by revealing the nature of the experiment to the group. That would be like telling a person they're receiving a placebo before they down the sugar pill.

Later, my mother chimed in:

OMG! I always wondered where Ryan got his liberal views from... now it’s becoming very clear! Proof that he has some of the east coast [redacted] blood in him! Oh Well... I love all of y’all even though we think differently. It’s what makes the world go around!

So it's been four days since the catalyst email, three days since Obama was exactly like Hitler, and two days since my big response and offer for an open forum. There have been a total of four email responses that weren't somebody asking me to remove them from the email listing. One of those emails said Obama was Hitler and the other one explained how that was true by ignoring the US's relatively recent history of recognizing dual citizenship, a fact that easily debunks the rationale of the Hitler comparison.

Sure, I'll give it more time. In fact, I'm still trying to encourage a conversation to take place. I spoke back to the group after my mother's post:

I think we should start a scientific study to find out if political leanings are hereditary. I'm sure it will be enlightening.

On another note, I just read back through the whole thread here and don't really spot a whole lot of "shoulds" or "ought tos" or anything else that suggests political leaning. In fact, politics weren't really part of the intended discussion, only whether or not Fox News Channel is actually a channel that presents news. That and trying to figure out how Obama is "just like Adolph Hitler".

It's not the conservative viewpoint that bothers me. There are tons of reasons to hold conservative values, especially if you're religious, but also in support of economics and good financial decisions. What bothers me is the total lack of discussion on the subject that discussion was encouraged on. The only person to weigh in on the issue at hand so far asked me to remove him from the email chain the moment his "Obama = Hitler" view was questioned. It seems that debate has been completely shirked.

And of course, I don't hold anything against anybody else here, either. I see the Internet as a giant means of global communication, and if others don't see it that way, that's fine, too.

The point of that email was to let them know that the subject is still open for discussion, that I've made my point, and that I am awaiting criticism, all the while trying to keep a general peace and moderation over it. I don't want to sound like a self-appointed moderator, which I'm not. I'm more of a peaceful provoker in this case, or at least that's my goal. We shall see where the week takes us in this matter.

Follow-Up: Fox News Isn't News Because They Discourage Conversation

2009-11-02T16:58:00.002-06:00

I'm cleaning up this post from a couple days ago. I inserted a horizontal break right before the part that I emailed out to the group attached to the original email described in that post.

I received a response to my query about the man relating Obama and Hitler:

The case that he is possibly not a "natural born American" and eligible to be the USA's president. He claimed to be Indonesian when he attended Havard on the publics money. Can't have it both ways. Hitler was not a native born German, but an Austrian when he became Germany's chanceller. One of Hitler's first moves was to suppress the press which he found offensive. Ditto in this case. Was wondering how you got my -mail address for your propoganda?

I responded:

First, I didn't specifically target your email address. I got yours the same way you got mine. By pressing the Reply To All button in my email client when I got the original email from [redacted]. My name is Ryan. I'm his grandson. I've removed [redacted] from this conversation at his request.

Second, I did not mean for my response to be construed as propaganda. When I read the original email, I interpreted it as propaganda since it didn't include much factual data. I researched the claims made in it and responded to those. My response undoubtedly ended up with some personal spin in it, and if that appears to be propaganda, I'm sorry. My intention was to incite conversation and debate, not to start a war via email. Conversation and debate are far better informationally than any news source regardless of agenda.

I'm actually glad that you took the time to respond to my questions. It's a bit non sequitur from what the original email was regarding, but I suppose it's a subject of reasonable discussion.

It looks like Obama was an Indonesian citizen at some point or another, assuming the report cards (or whatever you call the Indonesian equivalent) from Indonesia are valid. I hear that Indonesia does not allow non-citizens to attend school there. Certain US Supreme Court cases like Afroyim v. Rusk (1967) have made the US recognize dual citizenship. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii after Hawaii became the United States' fiftieth state, making him the natural born citizen the Constitution requires.

In other words, it is possible to have it both ways under both the U.S. Constitution and later rulings by the Supreme Court.

I don't know anything about the German government around the rise of the Third Reich, so I'm not qualified to say if the case of Hitler's chancellorship was anything like Obama's presidency is now, but comparing anybody to Hitler is a pretty outrageous statement, so I usually take claims like this with a certain amount of skepticism. As far as Hitler's quieting of dissenting press is concerned, I do know that Hitler used concentration camps to bind and silence his dissenters. Obama has not evidently taken the measure to this extreme.

The reason the White House gave is slightly conflicting. They don't consider Fox News to be a viable news source. However, when Fox raised hell and several other news sources backed out on the logic that if Fox can't do it, then they don't want to shows that other media outlets do consider Fox News to be a viable news source. This brings up some questions.

Is Fox News a viable news source?

Who decides what qualifications a news source must meet to be considered viable? The government? The people? Other news sources?

This particular situation was not a standard open door press release, but instead a timed, one-on-one interview session arranged by the Obama administration. Does that in any way give the administration more say in who gets to attend?

These are topics related to the original email that I would like to discuss if anybody is up for a bit of Internet-based open forum.

Since then, three people (of the nineteen on the original mailing) have asked me to remove them from the email chain. I have complied. My only problem was that the man who told me how Obama was just like Hitler was one of those three. I did, of course, remove him. Thus far, I have received no input on any of the questions I asked at the end of what you see here in the above blog post.

What can I gather so far? I don't know. There's not much I can say that wouldn't be based purely on suspicion other than that three people, including a person who initially wanted to argue and who called my response "propaganda" no longer want to participate in this conversation.

What do I suspect this means? I suspect that the person claiming Obama is a Hitler clone is basing his opinions on heresay and has nothing valuable to contribute, anyway. I suspect he uses Fox News as a primary source of political information and probably considers it to be credible. I suspect that when faced with calm, reasonable statements of opinion, he realizes his beliefs have been brought into question and he defends them with loudness, taking a cue from Bill O'Reilly. But this is all based on what I can deduce from the contents of his emails. It is important to note that I do not know who this man is. He probably does not see the Internet as an open forum the way I do, and that's okay.

This email chain is probably dead at this point, but I'm holding out for more. If it happens, I'll post it here, so stay tuned.

BIG CIA Christians

2009-10-31T23:27:00.003-05:00

That church by my house has two new backronyms up on their marquee this week.

B old
I n
G od

C hristians
I n
A ction

Bold in God? What the hell does that even mean? And what am I supposed to connote the CIA thing with?

Geniuses, the lot of them.

News Flash: Fox News Channel Is A Channel Without News

2009-10-31T14:49:00.022-05:00

I have the greatest relatives. Here's what got passed my way this week via email. Naturally, there's no source for the article. It was also sent as an attachment to an email whose body said simply, "Begin forwarded message:". It's horribly formatted, and I present it here in all its glorious craziness and poor grammar:

  Last week CBS announced that the Obama White House has banned Fox News=
 from their grounds. I found it appalling that a viable news agency was be=
ing denied access to the President.  Where was our first Amendment?  It wa=
s a radical move even for Obama.  Now I see why:
  -
  This Sunday Fox news, is going to air a very important documentary about=
 Barack Obama, Sunday night at 9 PM Eastern. 6 PM Pacific.=20

  The report will go back to Obama's earlier days, showing even then his=
 close ties to radical Marxist professors, friends, spiritual advisers, et=
c. It will also reveal detail his ties to Rev. Wright for 20+ yrs. How he=
 was participating with this man, and not for the reasons he states!=20

  The report has uncovered more of Obama's radical past and we will see th=
ings that no one in the media is willing to put out there. It will be a se=
gment to remember.=20

  Mark your calendar and pass this on to everyone you know: Sunday night,=
 8 PM. CT; 6 PM PT. Democrat or Republican, this report will open your eye=
s to how YOUR country is being sold down the road to Totalitarian Socialis=
m.. If you care about the direction of our country, pass this notice on to=
 everyone you know

I sent a response back (reply to all, of course) saying that I was too busy to do any research at the time, but my initial suspicion was that the White House may have been trying to weed out the crazies and not weed out conservatives (although the terms are becoming more synonymous every time I get one of these emails). Calling an employee of the U.S. Treasury a "czar" is only one obvious example of why.

The first response back was in large print, and reads:

And then again, Obama is afraid to face the facts, and is trying to squelch the truth (just like Adolph Hitler)

I responded:

What are those facts, and what evidence do you have to support them? How do these "facts" relate to Adolph Hitler? Does Obama have secret internment camps where he imprisons, enslaves, and ultimately kills anybody who gets in the way of what I'm sure you will call his "liberal agenda"? That sounds an awful lot like Guantanamo Bay, which, surprisingly enough, was a Bush thing.

I didn't mention it in the email, but Adolph Hitler didn't really try to "squelch the truth." He wrote a book called Mein Kampf explaining what he planned to do.

I have not gotten a response from that email yet, but will post it here when and if I get it. I have a feeling that none of my questions will be answered.

In short, the gist of the original email is that the White House excluded Fox News from ever showing up on White House property again ("the Obama White House has banned Fox News from their grounds") because Fox plans to air a program highlighting Barack Obama's past. This program — funded, shot, cut, and aired by Fox News — is bound to be full of shocking and undeniable truths, and the Obama administration is angry about it because they don't want Obama's radical socialist totalitarian agenda to become apparent. Therefore, Fox News is never allowed on 1600 Penn Ave. Ever!

Now that I've had some time to poke around, I see a couple of falsehoods in this email, and I'm able to see some of the reasoning behind the White House's decision.

First and foremost, Fox News was not banned from White House grounds. They were excluded from a group of mainstream media interviewers who would line up and interview Kenneth Feinberg for five minutes each. There is a massive difference between being excluded from a list once and being blacklisted from the property. Not to mention the fact that the White House changed their minds after Fox News started to cry about it.

Secondly, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is the one that gives citizens the freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. As far as I can tell, this decision has not kept Fox News employees from being religious, kept them from saying, printing or broadcasting anything, gathering together, or petitioning the government. The email says, "Where was our first Amendment?", but the First Amendment was there all along being completely unviolated. The only people violating the Constitution are the people who failed to read it, but who felt it necessary to claim some part of it had been breached.

The reasoning behind the White House's decision was simple: Fox News is not a news organization. It boils down to the fact that on multiple occasions, Fox News has organized events (and funded their organization) in direct opposition to the government. One such example is the Teabaggers' rally in D.C. on September 12, 2009. While this is perfectly legal to do, it makes Fox News something more akin a political action committee than a news organization. No, they're not trying to get someone elected right now, but they are trying to actively raise scandal to promote a different political party, which equates to the same thing come election time. Basically, they're not reporting news, they're telling people who to vote for. That's got a lot to do with how the administration chose which news organizations were allowed to attend.

Qualification #1: Must be a news source.

Hosts for various Fox News programs have been criticized too many times to count for not encouraging discussion (Bill O'Reilly likes to ask a question, let the interviewee get about three words in, and then shout over the interviewee's voice, drowning out anything she might have said) and calling Barack Obama a racist (Glenn Beck). Meanwhile, Obama's senior advisor claims that "[Rupert] Murdoch has a talent for making money, and I understand that their programming is geared toward making money." Rupert Murdoch is the Australian-cum-American owner of Fox News Channel.

And I want to see his birth certificate.

Fox News is welcome to come back to less organized press releases. They're welcome to try to convince Barack Obama or any of his cabinet members to come on their program. But quite frankly, I doubt any of Obama's cabinet will be willing to go onto a program where they are regularly called "czars" by people who

Don't know what czars are, and
Didn't call the cabinet members of any other administration by the same term.

If Fox News wants to play with the rest of the news channels, they're going to have to start acting like one themselves.

I will try to watch the documentary. I'll just be getting home from work when it airs, so I'll probably catch it on YouTube or FoxNews.com afterward. Perhaps I'll report on it after I watch it. I'm sure it will be completely factual and not based at all on speculation.

Here are some sources so you know I'm not just making this up. I have a hard time trusting anonymous articles like the one in the email.

Associated Press
White House advisers say Fox News is not news

Huffington Post
Fox News Producer Caught Rallying 9/12 Protest Crowd In Behind-The-Scenes Video

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
The Most Biased Name in News: Fox News Channel's extraordinary right-wing tilt

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

Conservatives are perfect, liberals are dirty assholes

2009-10-07T09:16:00.003-05:00

I received an email yesterday, the entire contents of which are spread out throughout this post, so I won't bother reprinting it here. The email makes some more blanket statements which are in direct opposition to citable truth. I won't spend much time telling you that this email, like all the others in circulation, doesn't cite any examples to back its claims up. But that's okay. It's a well-known fact that the truth has a clear liberal bias.

But seriously, folks...

More rationally speaking (and less jokingly), I'll give my thoughts on each of the items barfed up in the email.

GUN CONTROL

"If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, then no one should have one."

I think it's not so much that liberals don't like guns but that guns in the hands of the wrong people can cause problems. Liberals want to only allow guns in the hands of people who bother to practice safety. It's *usually* like the NRA tends to say. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Sometimes it's a case of an accident (Dick Cheney shooting Harry Whittington on a quail hunt; a child coming across dad's gun and haphazardly pulling the trigger), and accidents can be prevented by using common sense and taking safety precautions. When it comes to homicide, it's the intent of the gun-weilder to kill the victim, and there's no telling what can prevent this. Better parenting? We can't ensure that. Devise weapons that disable themselves when their weilder has homicidal thoughts? That's not even in the realm of possibility.

What we *can* do is make people take saftey courses before they are eligible to purchase a gun. We can refuse the sale of a weapon to a convicted felon to make sure (s)he doesn't make the same mistake twice. But regulation only works to a certain extent, after which it becomes a parody of itself. Too much regulation will spawn a black market with no regulation whatsoever, at which point regulation no longer serves the purpose it was originally intended to serve. Instead of being protective and keeping people out of jail by way of preventing crime, it begins to create crime itself by enforcing the very laws it intended for other purposes. Take a look at the federally mandated alcohol prohibition lasting from 1919 to 1933. Instead of keeping people safe from the dangers of alcohol, it gave birth to organized crime and such atrocities as the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.

Not only does regulation have to balance with itself, it must balance with existing legislation, in this case, the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment is very short, the Constitution itself not being a particularly difficult document to read. It simply says, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." It says that the intent of the amendment, is to prevent an unwanted, but forced government. Gun control laws to date have not violated this, and gun control laws in the future will also not violate this. Keeping guns away from known criminals is not the same as keeping guns away from anybody.

One way or the other, the comment made here is one suggesting that all conservatives are self-tolerant, uninterfering, and unmeddlesome on the subject of gun control while all liberals are autarchs bent on a total ban of firearms. Neither of these statements are true by their absolute nature. Blanket statements using absolute adjectives like "always" or "never" are usually false. A better, less false descriptor would be "usually" or "hardly ever."

DIET

"If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is, he wants to ban all meat products for everyone."

This is completely new to me. I've never heard of anybody trying to pass any kind of law banning the consumption of meat. A Google search for "vegetarian legislation" turned up nothing. When I queried for "vegetarian law" the only thing that I found was an article from November 2005 hosted at a law firm's website about a law passed in 2004 in which the FDA requires that common allergens be listed near places where you buy food. The article I found is here: http://www.karrtuttle.com/PDF%27S/vegetarian.pdf and the law itself (called the "Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004") is here: http://www.fda.gov/Food/LabelingNutrition/FoodAllergensLabeling/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/ucm106187.htm I haven't read the act yet, but I imagine this is why packages of M&Ms now come with a warning about how they're made in a factory that also processes peanuts.

That said, I can't help but think this is a moot point. Vegetarians are apparently not known for a ravenous, lupine desire to ban meat products as this statement claims. Besides, I fail to understand how a vegetarian diet relates to a bipartisan political system.

WAR

"If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy. A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good."

I'm tempted to ask my rather liberal, retired Marine Corp friend what he thinks of this statement. He did his duty for the country, fought in Afghanistan, and remains in support of liberal ideals. I'd also like to ask the guy who wrote this statement how he feels about diplomacy. Perhaps he thinks that making an attempt at resolving intercontinental disputes through discussion and agreement is a bad idea, and we should instead just jump to the conclusion that the other guy will always hate us and want us dead and that we should just annihilate them before they get a chance. This does not always work, but once the war starts, any chance of returning to diplomacy is gone for quite some time, so an attempt at conversation and understanding should come first. To my knowledge, a war has never ended with one side of the battle destroying the other side utterly. There's a treaty or compact or agreement involved at the end of a war. It's a sign that it's all over. The Geneva Convention in 1882 led Henri Dunant, a witness to the Battle of Solferino in the Second Italian War of Independence, to win a Nobel Peace Prize. In 1949, further treaties to the Geneva Convention finalized the second World War.

War is unfortunately a real, mandatory thing sometimes, but if it can be avoided, if lives can be saved before a war starts, I think that's the way it should be done. Can you cite an example of a liberal surrenderring while saving face? The author of this email didn't. I have an article from the New York Times with the headline "COLOMBIA LIBERAL TROOPS SURRENDER." That article was printed in 1901. Here it is: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9C00E1DF153FE433A25753C3A9679D946097D6CF In this context, the term "Liberal" refers to the name of a political party. It's a proper noun, not an adjective. The surrender involved a treaty "to safeguard the lives and liberty" of Colonese soldiers. Diplomacy ended the war.

Admittedly, this is a difficult thing to Google for. Whether that's because I don't know the search query to provide or because it's patently untrue is something I can't say. At this point, I lack proof in support and to the contrary of this "argument", but I'm comfortable saying that the "argument" is made using very leading weasel words.

HOMOSEXUALS

"If conservatives are homosexual, they quietly enjoy their life. If liberals are homosexual, they loudly demand legislated respect."

Gay people have been rather loud lately now that their lives can't be ruined by their outing. And it's not respect they want legislated. It's equality.

Over the years, our Constitution has been amended to allow for the freedom of black people and to give women the right to vote. In its original writing, a slave couldn't even cross state boundaries into a "free" state without anybody spotting that slave being legally obligated to return him to the state from which he came (Article IV, Section 2). Then we had a war. That war ended in a series of diplomatic agreements, one of which was the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment in 1865. It took us almost a century, but eventually, we got around to abolishing slavery. It took another five years for us to bother giving the rights the Constitution allows for all other men to black folks. See the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870. It took yet another fifty years for women to get the same treatment (Amendment XIX, 1920). Our own changes to our own government's defining document show that it never was a perfect document, and that it needed to be changed to grant various demographic groups the same rights others had before them in response to cultural changes.

But the changes to the Constitution didn't just happen on their own. Women didn't get the right to vote by just sitting around not complaining. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton started up the National Woman Suffrage Association to make noise and get changes made. When they did, congress gathered, discussed it, and ratified an amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed their right to vote. The women did not break any laws to accomplish this. They protested and petitioned. Those are two rights the Constitution grants to everyone.

Now culture is changing again. It's now considered mostly socially acceptable to be gay, and it's becoming less likely that a homosexual would be hitched to a truck and dragged through the streets. That's called a hate crime (a topic of an altogether different conversation). With less fear of persecution, the next step is to get the same rights that everybody else has.

If gay people want to be given the right to marry, they cannot be denied the right to protest and petition for such. Several states have already come to decisions surrounding this issue, many to the benefit of the protestors. Good for them! They excercised their rights and the democratic society we live in listened and reacted. If it's not the right to marry that they want, if it's only "legislated respect", it's only slightly different. They can still protest. They can still petition. The governments will still decide if and how respect for the queer segment of the population is to be regulated.

Respect is a funny thing, though. It's mutual. Just as a dues-paying, card-carrying, hood-clad Ku Klux Klan member is not required to respect a gay man or woman, no gay man or woman is required to respect a Klansman. I can guarantee you that when one person does not respect another - regardless of sexuality, race, religion, or any other personal matter - no respect will be reciprocated. And that's how it all starts, isn't it? A person wants to enjoy their life as the person they are, but when legal issues restrict them from the pursuit of happiness for no reason other than that they are who they are, they want to dispose of that restriction. A somewhat democratic society such as our own allows for those changes to be made and allows people the ability to make that happen. We can't just institute opression and expect the opressed to remain silent.

RACE ISSUES

"If a black man or Hispanic is conservative, he sees himself as independently successful. His liberal counterparts see themselves as victims in need of government protection."

Let's make a distinction real quick. A distinction between a poverty-stricken person without a single opportunity and a lazy person who cares little for responsibility and wants only to take handouts.

Any given person should be so lucky to live in a good school district near a school with valuable teachers and an environment equipped to prepare students for the world we live in. To the student, it really is a matter of fortune, dependent upon his parents' decisions. If mom was a stripper and dad was a crack dealer, it's unlikely that the child will go to the high school with a $15,000 technology budget and well-paid teachers.

On the other hand, if mom was an A-list movie star and dad was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the kid's probably going to an expensive private school with a higher profit margin than most public schools can achieve through government involvement from both the state and federal levels and by running fundraisers through every single extracurricular group they have.

What it boils down to is that some people are simply not put into a situation where they can be successful. That's why we have government programs to assist these people. A person's parents' bad decisions should not absolutely restrict a person from being successful.

Affirmative action, however, is not the solution. Saying that a man is more likely to get into a college or to get a good job based on his race is the same as saying that a man is less likely to get into a college or to get a good job based on his race. No one can be more equal than another person. Equality simply doesn't work that way.

Perhaps the black man is more afflicted by this plight than other racial groups, but he is not alone. Perhaps the black man is so afflicted because this country has a long history of racial atrocity that has led to depraved conditions. But black folks aren't the only ones affected. A piece of our country's history oft forgot is that in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt forced Japanese Americans into internment camps along the western-most states. This lasted for two years, and left the Japanese members of our society in such a state of poverty that Ronald Reagan decided to doll out $1.6 billion dollars in reparations in 1988.

If the statement made by the author of this email is to mean that liberal politics are, in part, about boosting the wealth of victims, then this is a radical turn of events. Roosevelt, a Democrat, caused the depravity while Reagan, a Republican, paid the victims a sum total of $1.6 billion dollars in the interest of "government protection".

More likely, it's just a consideration of the fact that social issues are a major part of any government's job, and if a democratic government is listening to its people, then this could be the right thing to do. But I think there is a much better solution, and it lies not in giving money to the poor, but giving money to the schools and businesses that assist the poor. This would be a system where the people who play the helpless victim and won't get up and take care of themselves are still allowed to fail, as they should, but in which people with initiative can find opportunities to match that initiative. We can't solve the problem of racially driven social issues until we remove the racial part from the problem.

SOCIAL ISSUES

"If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him."

I'm not sure what this is in reference to. I could just easily cite the Christians' favorite tale about footprints along the beach and Jesus carrying them through times of trouble as a tale that contradicts this statement. And I could say that a person who seeks the help of other people are at least relying on reality for support instead of a two thousand year old ghost. Or I could try and make some sense of this and translate it into a modern context and call it a complaint about social issues.

Should people rely solely on themselves for emotional, physical, or financial support in times of stress and poverty? If so, then churches serve no purpose since parish money given to needy churchgoers is so disturbingly wrong. If so, Medicare should be disposed of. We should simply not bother with economic stimulus packages like the ones given out over the past few years. Bush spent $170 billion in checks to taxpayers to attempt to bring back the economy. Barack Obama spent $787 billion on the same effort through various programs. If the statement made is true, then social issues are no issues at all, and nobody should pay them any mind.

Rather, I would restructure this statment to reflect that conservatives reject the idea of spending money on human life while liberals wonder how they can help people. Any one of these statements can be turned around just as easily.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH/THE ARTS

"If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down."

I seem to remember reading once about a certain conservative Austrian who gained political power by putting anybody he didn't agree with into concentration camps right before using that political power to create a giant empire across a large portion of Europe and inciting a war that involved the better part of the world. I think his name was Hitler Something.

Not long after, once the Nazi threat was disposed of, a new threat with a more generic name enshrouded the country. It was called Communism, and a Republican named Joseph McCarthy thought he could control America's perception of it and the Democratic party by accusing the Democrats of being in support of communism. He cited names from a list that he could never produce (yet which he claimed was valid and came from a legitimate source) and associating those names with anything from communism to sexual perversion, ruining lives without ever being able to provide any evidence to support his arguments. Hundreds of people were imprisoned, jobs were lost, and reputations were ruined over nothing but lies and unverifiable claims.

Liberals, at least those concerned with liberty, tend to support freedom of speech. Personally, I encourage the regular excercise of one's freedom of speech, but also encourage some amount of effort to research claims. Given the kinds of things that have actually happened due to baseless claims, I think that suggestion is valid. I don't want Bill O'Reilley and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to "be shut down," but I do wish they'd be less sensational and more factual. Such is the nature of infotainment, however. If the talking heads refuse to get it right, then listeners and viewers need to do some personal investigation on the talking points.

RELIGION

"If a conservative is a nonbeliever, he doesn't go to church. A liberal wants all churches to be silenced."

Regular Internet message board visitors have a way of turning complex sentiments into concise words that accurately represent that sentiment better than a full description of it can. The one that comes to mind right now is, "LOLWUT?!" This word expresses a reaction to something so ludicrous that the only reaction possible upon being exposed to the ludicrous, irrational thought is laughter. The statement being reacted to is so ridiculous that it at first appears as a non-sequitur joke.

The Christians of this country have a sense of reighteousness that is so blindingly powerful that it brings about a constant sense of persecution when no such persecution exists. It comes from having an absurd faith in a book that contradicts itself on a page-by-page basis (see the first two chapters of Genesis for two completely different creation stories, or check out some of the lineage chapters like Genesis 5 or 10 for people who inexplicably live to 900 years of age despite God's declaration in Genesis 6:3 that people will only live to 120 from that point on) and an even more absurd collection of dogmatic law that their religious book doesn't set forth and upon which no two subsets of Christianity can agree. That faith is so strong that it turns a historical book with chronological and logical inconsistencies by the dozen and societal implications that no longer hold relevence into a perceived unquestionable truth. The Bible no longer remains an amalgamation of historical witness from several viewpoints. It no longer is a document that was finally written down after being passed down verbally, generation upon generation upon generation, until it finally was heard by a person with the education necessary to be literate, like some centuries-long game of Chinese whispers. It is 100% pure, unquestionable truth, and any question about any of the Bible's contents or any of the false logic resulting in the generation of fallacious dogma isn't a question of reason. It's religious persecution.

Nevermind the Spanish Inquisition, an entire campaign run by a political Roman Catholic church to convert people of other religions to Catholicism via use of torture devices. Nevermind the Medieval Inquisition, the Papal Inquisition, the Episcopal Inquisition, the Mexican Inquisition, and the Peruvian, Portuguese, and Roman Inquisitions. Ignore all the historical torturing of Muslims, Jews, pagans, and basically anybody else, all in the name of the Christian God and the various churches and subreligions centric to that concept.

But if a person makes a claim that maybe the Bible is any way inaccurate, ask a simple question or disagree with an answer, and suddenly, the Christians are persecuted.

Most Christians believe that Jesus Christ was born on December 25th to a virgin mother. Of the Bible's four gospels, only one mentions a virgin birth, but it also mentions the possibility that Joseph suspected Mary of having an illicit sexual affair and becoming pregnant from a man other than himself, which is far more rational. None of the gospels mention that it was even wintertime, much less the exact date that Christians is practiced on. Christians also refuse to believe that the dates set aside for holidays like Christmas, Easter, and Halloween are actually arbitrary dates set conveniently for the sole purpose of making a conversion for pagans easier. Christmas, Easter, and Halloween all fall on or near pagan holidays - solstices and equinoxes. Mention this to a Christian who is convinced enough of the flawlessness of his religion, and he will lay out the fire and brimstone in rage.

Christians are all up in arms about atheists (who, by the way, are a secular class of people) putting up posters advertising atheism, but if I ask the 150 churches in a ten mile radius of my house to remove the Bible quotes and cheesy messages (like "C H _ _ C H - WHAT'S MISSING? U R"), that's unlawful persecution, and a violation of their right to practice whatever religion they choose.

Liberals don't want churches to be silenced. Not all liberals are atheists. Like it or not, there are tons of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintos, and countless other religious believers who also happen to hold liberal ideologies. Mahatma Ghandi was Hindu. He was, as far as the political spectrum is concerned, a radical leftist. He was also a racist bent on ridding India of black people. You can't just lump people into two groups. It doesn't work that way. Not everything is black and white. People have personalities which are complex and sometimes inexplicable. You keep on practicing your religion, and I'll go on practicing none at all. As long as you don't persecute me and I don't persecute you, we should get along just fine. But simply questioning your religion and the corporate nature of Christian holidays is not an expression of wanting "all churches to be silenced."

Oh, and as long as you don't try to bring an uncertain morality set upon by an irrational fear of an unprovable deity into a secular government. Then we're fine.

HEALTH CARE

"If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that his neighbors pay for his."

"Demands" is a strong and unfair word. "Choose a job" is an impossibility. You can't select a job on the basis of health care benefits alone. It doesn't work that way. And it's not like your average Joe the Plummer has ten employers banging down his doors begging and pleading for him to come work at their company.

A friend of mine got laid off and spent a few months without a job. When she needed help, her friends came together and helped her. We didn't do that because we were obligated to, but because we wanted to. Because we care about the continuation of our species and know that no man or woman can make it in any society without the support of his/her peers. That's what that whole marriage thing is all about, too.

Similarly, if someone can't afford health care, or if insurance providers refuse to offer financial support to an individual on the basis that the person was sick before they asked for help, then is that person supposed to be out of luck? Are they supposed to suffer? Die? Are we supposed to stand back in a society with the means of supporting people who can't support themselves and just watch them struggle? Is that fun for conservatives?

No, a liberal does not demand that his neighbors pay for his insurance. Anybody who's been following the latest "health care crisis" (which is not a health care issue despite what the papers say) will know that the most popular bill going through congress involves a government option for paid health insurance. The only people given free health insurance are people whose income is less than three times the present poverty line. Currently, that equates to about $33,000 annually for a single person or about $63,000 for a family of four including two kids.

I do not demand that my neighbors pay for my insurance, but if I were ever in a situation where I could not manage on my own for whatever reason, I would hope that my friends and family would help me out a bit. Obviously, conservatives don't understand this, or this complaint would not be lodged and circulated about the Internet by various conservative people. Therefore, I'm glad that some legislation might take place to make it happen.

CONCLUSION

This email makes conservatives out to be shining, perfect examples of a perfect society while basically using the word "liberal" as profanity. Liberals are not the depraved, worthless, stupid, amoral, mindless, autacracy-bent, vegan, homosexual, racist, responsibility-shirking, passive, surrendering pansies this email makes them out to be, and conservatives are not all perfect, understading, tolerant, intelligent, rich, white, Christians making love to Sarah Palin every chance they get. People are people, and that's about the best generalization one can make about them. People's pasts, upbringings, geographical locations, religions, relative wealth, genetic makeup, and personalities all drive their political decisions, and the wonderful thing about humans is that even when we're twins, we're not the same.

Definition of Irony

2009-09-18T09:56:00.002-05:00

I was driving from Austin to San Antonio the other day. It was pouring down rain, I needed to pee, and a soda sounded really good at the moment. I stopped at a small gas station in Blanco, Texas to accomplish these tasks all at once.

When I went to check out, I noticed a gallon-sized plastic jug with some money in it and a piece of paper taped across its front. The paper had a photograph of a man and a woman dressed in red, white, and blue matching cowboy and cowgirl outfits. They were patriotic to a T, all the way down to the stars and stripes pattern on their button-up shirts and cowboy hats.

The text described how the man in the photograph, Michael, had been in a terrible accident, and had to be rushed to University Hospital (a hospital in the South Texas Medical Center in San Antonio well known for being a fast-response emergency trauma center). It explained how he was in a very serious state of bodily disrepair, and they had no health insurance to cover the bills. So they were taking up donations from the community to help them out.

Boy, I sure hope they weren't part of the 70% of people who voted against Obama. I furthermore hope they weren't part of the group of people who marched against universal health care and socialism on September 12.

It's entirely possible they're from the Obama camp, but I doubt it. If the 70% McCain voting record from the 2008 presidential election for Blanco County doesn't provide good enough odds, I offer up the "patriotic" clothing they bore as further evidence. I wonder if they know that their problem could be solved by universal health care and that what they're doing now is creating a social program.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's the definition of irony.

The Teabaggers

2009-09-16T09:12:00.009-05:00

I was going to leave it alone. I was going to remain silent. I thought that my words would be too obvious to speak. But no.

It took three whole days for somebody to come up with an opinion editorial actually approving of the marches on Washington D.C. on September 12, 2009. And it came to me from someone I know and care about via email. He is known for being conservative. He is known for listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching Fox News, but I thought, "Certainly, certainly, he cannot think the teabaggers are a movement to take seriously."

But then the email came through. It was entitled "Let's see him ignore this turnout." It made bold claims about the two million people who showed up. Apparently the article's author (who was not mentioned in the email, and niether was the source for the article) didn't realize that the two million people that Michelle Malkin estimated was a lie and a vast inflation of the actual turnout. The email even said,

I believe that this day could be referred to in the not too distant future as the day that changed America.

It was laughable, depressing, and infuriating all at once.

The protest was not ignored. It was laughed at. It was a group of people protesting "czars" and "socialism", not knowing what either term means. People protesting a national health care program without realizing that it would most likely leave them unaffected.

I believe that this day will never be called "the day that changed America" by anybody in his right mind. I believe that this day is already being thought of as the day sane people realized how crazy the distant right wing is. Not all conservatives are completely nuts. This is exactly the small, vocal minority that the email claims "has finally found its voice." Obama, for instance, is a largely conservative president with a few liberal ideas. I ask for evidence from anybody who claims he is a radical leftist to prove their point or give creedence to their opinion. What has Obama done that is so "leftist" as to spark a legitimate use of the modifier "radical"?

Most of these people can't even agree on where Obama falls on the political spectrum. People at the rally accused him of fascism, marxism, and socialism, going so far as to call him a Nazi and compare the national health care program to the Nazi campaign to sterilize or kill people whose breeding would not result in acceptable members of the Aryan race due to those people's racial and genetic qualities. In truth, none of these things are even remotely true. Obama is a slightly right-of-center politician whose stance on issues is mostly in middle-ground territory. But instead of recognizing Obama for what he is, the "teabaggers" have decided to flounder like a creationist in a room full of scientists. They pull out words like "fascism" and "Marxism" and, aside from not knowing what those words mean, the teabaggers can't agree on what exactly Obama is. Is he a right-wing extremist fascist? Is he a left-wing extremist socialist? These terms don't even fall near one another on the political spectrum, but they're all just fine and happy to agree that he's a "radical leftist".

The ignorance of these people is something these people have no problem making obvious themselves. Their lack of knowledge about politics makes it especially meaningless for them to protest a political matter, and it shows. Their ignorance to what Barack Obama has actually proposed and their subsequent screaming against it is further proof.

The health bill, for example, leaves the private sector alone, always giving consumers of health insurance a choice of government-operated or corporation-operated insurance, and never affecting anyone's current insurance status. Medicare and Medicaid programs remain intact. No employer's insurance company loses out, except in cases where they have written unfair policies which allow them to deny virtually all claims sent their way. Private sector insurance policies would become illegal in cases where claims could be universally denied. In this way, the consumer wins. Euthanasia is never considered in the entire 1,000+ page bill. Not once. Don't worry, granny. Nobody's pulling your plug.

The term "socialism" refers to a system of government where resources are available to all citizens. Most countries' governments bear some socialist qualities, including most European countries (like England and France), Scandinavian countries (Switzerland and Finland), Canada, and - as surprising as it may seem - the United States of America. Our police force is a public service available to all people, and their paychecks are made of citizen taxes. That's also how our fire departments work.

Medicare is a socialist program where I pay for senior citizens' medical bills under the assumption that I will, one day, benefit in the same way. The problem with Medicare is that, since inflation, rising costs of living, elevated education costs, and capitalism in general, the cost of a doctor's visit or hospital stay has increased beyond anything the signers of the Social Security bill could have imagined. As such, more money is coming out of Medicare than is being put in. At the rate that this is happening, I will not be able to enjoy its benefits when I am eligible. The present working class of this country will lose out on a benefit the elder class has enjoyed, and doubly so, since we paid for it and will never see it brought to fruition for us. Unless, that is, another health care system is in place to force competition into the rising insurance prices, forcing costs down so I may be able to afford health insurance in my old age. Unless another health care system is put in place for me to fall back on. The "death panels" are a lie, and you can read the bill for yourself to figure that out. Listening to pundits with a clear bias will get you nowhere.

Which brings me to my next point. ABC never reported two million protestors. ABC spoke to the only department in the city legally qualified to make crowd size estimates, the Washington DC Fire Department, who claimed 60-70,000 attendees. ABC refutes ever making such a ludicrous estimate, and there is a large amount of suspicion that photos produced by Michelle Malkin may have been altered, faked, or had their timestamps intentionally cut off to back up those claims. Even the Christian Science Monitor, a well-known conservative news source, notes that several sources have made valid points against the photo, and also mention that since the backlash against the photograph, it has been pulled from most of the sites and news outlets who were using it to their advantage. This makes fantastic ammo against anybody who claims something like "You won't see this on NBC-CNN-ABC-MSNBC" (which is what the source of this email prepended to the sourceless, anonymous editorial). Of course I saw it on "NBC-CNN-ABC-MSNBC". But there, they actually asked an official who made the estimate he's allowed to make, and they didn't try to pass off a made up number onto some other, competing news source to make the "movement" seem more powerful than it really was.

More things the teabaggers don't understand:

Czars. A czar is "an emperor or king." Also, "an autocratic ruler or leader." "Autocratic" is the adjectival form of "autocrat", which is "an absolute ruler" or "a person invested with or claiming to exercise absolute authority." Neither of those describe President Obama, who has yet to exhibit any kind of absolute rule or even an attempt at such. Anyone with evidence to the contrary (evidence that isn't centered on baseless speculation) can leave it in the comments. I would love to hear it.

Another term teabaggers don't understand, but which they are willing to rally against:

Marxism! That's a great one, especially for me since I've studied it more than most other philosphies and government designs. Marxism is the philosophy laid out by Karl Marx which explains a society with only two classes of notable size: the few, elite, very wealthy business owners known as the bourgeoisie and the larger, poor, looked-down-upon class of people who work for the bourgeosie called the proletariat. A few other classes of people exist in Marxist philosophy as well, but they are very small. The petit-bourgeosie work for the bourgeosie, but still own businesses and employ laborers. There is also a class of land or real property owners, a class of vandals and criminals, and a class of peasant farmers. In Marxism, the rich maintain their wealth while the impovershed remain impovershed. The proletariat are paid by the bourgeosie, but when the proletariats' money is spent, it goes straight into the businesses owned by the bourgeosie. The monetary divide between classes is wide and unbreakable. A Fairfield University study from 2004 shows that "the top 10% of families owns over 71%" of the money in the United States. That number has increased since 1983. The wealthiest 20% gained over 3% more of the total money in America over that eleven years. The article points out that "the evidence suggests an increase in inequality over time." This is more or less in line with Marxism, and this data reflects a time period before Barack Obama was in the presidency. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, however, were in the presidency over the course of those years, but none of these "teabaggers" ever picketed against them using the term "Marxist." I fail to see how it applies to Barack Obama.

Some of the picketers believe that Obama plans to take away their guns. It is true that Obama has put pressure on the gun control issue. He has a track record of either legislating or vocally supporting legislation which would tighten control over firearms. This has included banning semi-automatic weapons in Illinois. He has also supported the Second Constitutional Amendment regarding the right to bear arms while at the same time supporting states' rights to ban handguns. More recently, he has openly opposed concealed firearms on a Chicago Public Radio program called "Eight Forty-Eight," saying, "I continue to support a ban on concealed carry laws". In 2008, he stated that he would permanently reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban that former president George W. Bush allowed to expire. While his views on this tend to be more liberal and controlling, he's hardly the first president to support these views. This is, after all, a common talking point for the US Democratic party. The Supreme Court continues to rule in favor of the Constitution because, let's face it, that's their job. Since Obama has been in the presidency, he has made no move to control firearms, apparently supporting his prior defense of the Second Amendment. No matter his views, I hardly believe it warrants death threats, like some of the protesters made.

The secessionists were out in force as well. These are people who believe they can simply secede from the United States without conflict, and who believe that they can simply claim they're not part of the US anymore and still get to keep any government-funded property that's on it, and that they won't have any problem continuing to fund the US-funded programs in the state (like the half-and-half funding that goes into each state's version of Medicaid). Not that it's legal, anyway. It was believed that Texas was the only state that had the legal right to secede from the US... Until 1869, when the legal case of Texas v. White occurred, and it was legally cemented that not even Texas, which was thought to have that right, actually had it. Anybody who believes that any one of the United States can secede without it being considered an act of treason or war, any person who thinks that the militia their state would have to come up with to fight off the specially-trained US Army could ever stand a chance at succeeding in that task, anyone who believes that seccession wouldn't lead to a state-wide civil war between those who wanted to secede and those who didn't is living out an elaborate and mindless delusion where they ignore a unifying decision made 140 years ago.

As if this point alone doesn't prove how out of touch with modern concepts this group of people are, their name should do the trick. Teabagging carries a vulgar sexual definition with it these days that many people laugh at. To "teabag" a person is to drop one's pants and underwear and lift the penis into the air, allowing the scrotum to dangle, resembling a teabag with string, and subsequently drop the scrotum into a sleeping (or often passed-out-drunk) person's open mouth. Frequently, a picture is taken to commemorate the event. The "teabaggers" carry that connotation unknowingly or uncaringly or both.

Many of the teabaggers claimed that Obama was trashing the Constitution, some signs showing Obama physically ripping the document in two. George W. Bush was known for doing this, even calling the Constitution "just a goddamned piece of paper." He also passed the Patriot Act, which extremely vaguely altered other laws to allow for wiretapping without a warrant, directly opposing the Fourth Constitutional Amendment. The Patriot Act also allows for the detaining of American citizens indefinitely and without a trial, a violation of due process outlined in the Sixth Amendment. There are other violations to be found as well. It's written with a vague purpose allowing any of these violations to occur for any reason whatsoever, which can also be read as "for no reason at all" or "because we felt like it." The purpose section of the act ends with "and for other purposes." Bush may not have written this, but when I read the act, that was the first thing I noticed. The bill should never have gotten past the White House for this reason alone. If you can't specify why the bill is needed, the bill perhaps isn't needed. President Bush also set up so-called "Free-Speech Zones" wherever he traveled, confining dissenters to an easily-controlled location, suggesting that free speech can only happen in certain places. That's not free speech. And yet these teabaggers didn't have a problem with any of that. Their argument is made invalid by hypocrisy alone. They should be glad that Obama has allowed them to protest in front of the White House. They should be glad they have the right to do this, and that the president isn't trying to convince them that they do not. Obama has called the Constitution "deeply flawed," but has never acted against it, and, like I mentioned before, he has upheld the Second Amendment on several occasions. That's the one a lot of these people are so concerned over.

Many teabaggers took this opportunity to promote Sarah Palin and the Christian god. These guys usually come up with, "This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values." However, I would pressure any citer of said quote to produce any value the United States is based on that can only be found in Judeo-Christian literature (i.e. The Bible). I hate to shock anybody, but morals are not necessarily the product of any single religion, no matter how special and righteous that religion may make them feel. It is disheartening to know that so many people believe as Sarah Palin does that the war in Iraq was "a task from God." Religious beliefs aside, when the terrorists say that killing American swine is doing God's work, they call it jihad and we call it a bad thing. Hypocritically, when Sarah Palin says it, it's somehow completely acceptable. Also hypocritically, when people believe this country is somehow "God's country," they tend to miss the whole thing where the Christian God supposedly loves everybody. It's the same hypocrisy that surrounds the entire faith, but taking it into politics is a sure-fire way to turn the United States into a system so thoroughly saturated in religious vitriol that we are no different from the "terrorist" countries we're fighting.

The "birthers" were also present. These are the people who, despite how much evidence is handed to them when they ask, can simply not accept that Barack Obama was born on US soil. One protest sign read, "HEY BARRY... SHOW U.S. YOUR SMALLPOX VACCINATION", by which I assume he meant the record of his smallpox vaccination. Something tells me he doesn't actually want more smallpox.

The truth is that the supposedly non-existant conservative media has programmed these people to loudly recite talking points that make no sense and about which discussion is not encouraged. Discussion and research are the first line of defense against stupidity like this. And I really wish I could sugarcoat it, but I can't. This really is the largest display of concentrated ignorance that I've seen in my entire life.

Sources, since I researched and want you to be able to do the same:

Welcome to the Internet

2009-09-11T12:01:00.004-05:00

Hi! Welcome to the Internet! My name is Ryan, and I'll let you go and have fun after a brief introductory message and disclaimer. I'll be as brief as I can be so you can go start a flamewar on Facebook or whatever it is you were going to do before I stopped you.

The Internet is a wonderful place full of people to meet and things to do. It's a worldwide, digital meeting place where thoughts are exchanged from all over the globe. While online, you are likely to meet people from foreign places that may seem strange to you. You could meet people from Nairobi or Stockholm or Brooklyn.

Please bear in mind as you traverse the Internet (which is a series of tubes, as you may already know) that these people come not only from separate countries, but from disparate cultures and worldviews. Yours may not be the only worldview you encounter. Try to keep that in mind as you meet all these people, and refrain from using racial slurs, degrading epithets, and pejorative terms such as "nigger", "fag", or "stupid inbred fuck". These terms are offensive, and are guaranteed to start flamewars.

Also please be conscious that not all information on the Internet is true. You should research supposed facts and provide logical, level-headed arguments against them when they are wrong. There is no reason to spread lies to try and prove a point. A mockery will be made of you.

Oh, who'm I kidding? Those fucking assholes have it coming. Flame on, you dumb bitch.

Militant?

2009-09-11T10:50:00.002-05:00

The non-denominational Christian church next to my house has a marquee outside upon which is posted a new message every Sunday. That message sticks around all week until they change it again. They have a thing for acrostics, and this week is no exception. The sign reads:

Be
A
Soldier
In
Christ

Next time someone calls me a "militant atheist," I will let them know about this sign, which advocates military service for their religion. Doesn't that sound an awful lot like Jihad?

Google Suggest suggests pulpy tale

2009-07-23T08:05:00.004-05:00

A man, torn between the evils of society and the call of his natural sexual instincts, ponders his financial situation, leaving his wife for another man, and shaving his nether regions.

The Plot Twist: Footprints

2009-07-15T08:39:00.004-05:00

We've all heard the story that Christians tell about a beach, Jesus, and the help they receive from the Lord or G-d or Y----h or whoever during their lives. But it never really struck a chord with me. This is my take on the story:

A man dreamed he walked along the beach at sunset with Jesus. Images of his life played out in the painted sky reminding him of the good times and the bad. The man noticed that at times of wealth, prosperity, and general warm-fuzziness, there were two sets of footprints on the ground near him, and Jesus stood at their end. However, when he was poor, helpless, and alone, only one set of footprints trailed off behind him; Jesus was nowhere to be found. So the man queried Jesus the next time He was around. "Jesus," he said. "Yes, my son," replied Jesus. The man said, "I can't help but notice that when things are hunky-dory, you're right here next to me, but when life was beating me up, you weren't around. Why is that?" Jesus laughed condescendingly. "My son! I was with you! I was just playing that game where you try to step exactly in the footsteps of the person in front of you. I'm just really good with that. It's like that scene from the end of The Shining - the Kubrick version, not the miniseries - with Danny Torrance in the hedge maze, with the snow... You know what I'm talking about."

You knew Jesus could walk on water, but he could also walk on sand, and he was very good at it. I contemplated a Tyler Durden ending to this. You know, Jesus was all just a figment of the man's imagination. Or maybe that's The Man. Either way, it would have been too true to be funny.

God casts level 2,000 Bless, but occasionally misses when his d1000 hits a 666

2009-06-21T18:21:00.003-05:00

You're an infant. You're beginning to ken the basic foundations of language. One of the first things you learn to say is:

"Bless us, O Lord, for these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive in Thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord. Amen."

You're officially Catholic.

Looking back, and having written that with proper grammar and punctuation, you notice that there is something fundamentally wrong about that particular prayer, the least of which is the overabundance of commas. When you're saying this every night at the dinner table, you can literally hear the capital letters, like there's something holy about them. And the rhythm. It's as if a particularly bad poet penned these words.

Bless us, O Lord
For these, Thy gifts,
Which we are about to receive
In Thy bounty,
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

There's a rhythm, but it loses something in the "In Thy bounty." Something about a missing stressed syllable.

Linguistics aside, you experience the core foundation and the core fallacy of Catholicism, perhaps without realizing it. It's the same thing every night for every Catholic family. You can imagine the world spinning, and right as six o'clock hits each time zone, a few million of these prayers come mumbling forth from the mouths of every feeding Christ-mourner. It's a rolling wave of Gifts and Bounty. What you come to realize over time is that none of them know what they're saying. They've never stopped and thought about it. If they had, they would have realized that the sentence diagram for this particular prayer is enormous, and something that a linguistics professor's head would explode over.

What does it mean? What's being said? You are requesting that you -- your person -- receive a blessing from God because you're about to eat food that God, in all his infinite benevolence, has provided to you. That's right. It's food from God. And you can't eat without being divinely blessed beforehand.

The time zone wave of repetitive murmurs circles the globe, and these requests for blessings due to one of the world's most common activities are assumed to be granted, and granted with such immediacy that any given family among the hundreds of thousands in Central Standard Time feel comfortable with tucking in within seconds of their "Amen." If you're me, this kicks off a whole new train of thought:

If there are millions of people saying this prayer at once in any given massive north-south strip of the planet, and they all believe that God's blessed them within a second and a half of the prayer's conclusion, and if I assume that all of this is actually true, then I'm left with no other conclusion than that God is blazingly fast at blessing people. I mean REALLY fast.

And the Question of the Week is... What if God misses?

Seriously. What if God's just throwing these blessings out left and right, up and down, back and forth, and one little Ray of Bless just happens to go astray? This may seem innoculous at first, but imagine that it lands on the house of a serial killer. Or worse, a gay person. Holy crap! What if God blessed a Gay Person on accident?

I'm sure that many will take this opportunity to claim God's infallibility, but I find it highly unlikely that even some divine entity could bless everyone and still have time to answer prayers. In fact, it shows. Hurricanes, earthquakes, wars, famine... I could go on, or you could just read America's Horsemen. These are things which God fails to address.

One might conclude that there is no God, but that's just too depressing to bother with. How can it be more depressing than Catholicism? I dunno. No light at the end of the tunnel, or something. I just prefer to think that there is no tunnel. I'm not trapped. I don't need the blessings of a deity to make it through life and provide me with a moral compass.

This brings up a good point, though. What is a blessing from God? Is it forgiveness? If so, what's so wrong with eating? A billion people worldwide need to be forgiven for the act of eating God's bounty on a daily basis. Maybe it's just God giving Catholics the world over permission to eat. Whatever floats your boat, man. I've been eating without prayer my entire life and I haven't been smitten. Maybe God missed and hit me with a Ray of Bless on accident or something.

America's Horsemen

2009-05-24T18:17:00.003-05:00

Trees line the American highways. What a notion.

In Brazil, trees are chopped down. They are chewed up by metal monsters, then spat out into trucks. They are shipped to Laredo, where they sit in a warehouse waiting to be driven to Detroit, where they are mixed with glue and pressed and formed into shitty particle board desks that fall apart.

There's a man in a high-rise in downtown Dallas. He sits at a flimsy desk with a computer and CAD software designing more flimsy desks and going home at night to his $500,000 home in Plano. He fills his gas tank. Wars are fought over such things as this, torture methods conceived, while unrenewable resources are depleted and the entire planet conspires to destroy itself slowly over time.

It's a corporate-driven genocide. Death rides in on the heated leather seats of a Hummer, a four-dollar styrofoam cup of coffee resting in one of countless cup holders.

The new religion has begun. Worship and praise are sung, not to a deity, but to Oil. We harbor vendettas and racism and xenophobia. We hear the whip-snap of the bible belt.

War and famine and pestilence and death. The four horsemen ride through America on their mares of steel and plastic, and either nobody knows or nobody cares. How far off are the Christians, really?

There's mercury in the fish.

The squirrels are all dying because the only trees left are right on the highway.

The landfills are full.

The porno mags are selling. The porno web sites are selling. People think that they need enormous breasts or washboard abs to be sexy, and maybe they're right. Plastic surgeons are building mansions with the dollar bills of the bodily insecure. Chinese wax therapists are throwing away everyone's body hair. Personal trainers are making people feel better and look better and have better sex because somehow all of that matters. Hollywood stars don't eat much, and when they eat anything at all, they wait five minutes and vomit. They swallow a bite and feel guilty. They waste away while papparazzi take photos of them on the beach. Magazines fret over stretch marks on the recently pregnant moms of Los Angeles, California. They worry about cellulose. They worry about bad Botox injections. They worry that so-and-so's dress is bad, and they publish it, and then people who don't have the money to wear the dresses worry that perhaps the stretch marks on their love handles are unsightly or that their ass is too hairy or maybe their boobs are too small. So they pay up to the magic doctors who fix it all and go home to their lonely existences with their hot supermodel wives and wonder what they'll do with this month's million dollars. But still, the patients think they're too fat, so they pay up for liposuction and still think they're too fat. They stop eating. They vomit when they swallow chicken soup. They waste away, but for no good reason. Ethiopian children have bloated bellies from starvation, but these people look at food like it's poison. And the TV watches it all and pipes it straight back to the American people live via satellite so they know in real time, all the time, just how fucked up everyone else is. So they know what they're supposed to look like. So they can drop that extra ten pounds and then some. So they can have silicone implants in their chest. So they can have the perfect Barbie body. So they can feel good about themselves behind closed doors.

Hugh Heffner sells another issue of Playboy.

People scream because they're not accepted. They want government mandates that say a black man can't call a Mexican man a spic. They want government mandates that say a straight man can't call a gay man a queer. They want government mandates that say a Muslim can't call a Christian an infidel. In other words, they want government mandates that say the pot can't call the kettle black. Nobody knows who they are anymore because nobody's allowed to identify themselves.

People want to be paid back for actions taken against their ancestors who have been dead for two hundred years by other people whose ancestors who have been dead for two hundred years. They want to own land and secede from legality. They want to run casinos. They want to fool people into thinking they can win a few bucks or a few thousand. They want to stack the odds. They want to redirect income from here to there because it suits a better purpose there than here.

Someone wants to smoke pot. Someone wants to do meth. Someone wants to spend a billion dollars to make sure they don't. Someone else wants to start wars in Laredo until people can still smoke pot and do meth. Someone wants to kidnap women. Someone wants to rape children. Someone sets a goal to kill fifty people before the cops catch him. Some teenager hates his life, so he wants to fill the high school hallways with blood before spilling a drop of his own. Someone wants to put that on TV just to let the rest of the kids know they can get away with it if they only off themselves before they finish up. A baseball player wants to break the rules and shoot steroids. A football player wants to kill his wife. So many people want so many things that are illegal in just as many ways. They all want money.

It can all be turned into money.

Shitty particle board desks that fall apart are profitable. Oil and gasoline are profitable. War is profitable. Guns, switchblades, pills, surgical procedures. It's all money waiting to be moved. Its all an empty bank account waiting to be filled. Religion is profitable. Just ask the Scientologists. Or the Catholics. TV makes money. Pornography makes money. Gambling makes money. Bad traffic in Atlanta makes money, but it's all rather pacifying when you get to look at the pretty trees while you're stuck there.

The four horsemen of the apocalypse have arrived, sitting comfortably in the backseat of a stretch limo with bulletproof windows. How much would you pay to get away from it all?

Attempted murder in Smalltown, USA

2009-04-26T18:25:00.004-05:00

Last night I walked home from a friend's house around the corner to find four police cars (one unmarked) parked in front of my next-door neighbor's house and police tape wrapped from the hood rack of their minivan to their front porch to a barbecue pit in the middle of the vacant lot between our houses to my side porch to my air conditioner compressor, and finally to a water pipe sticking out of the ground, obviously surrounding a haphazardly-parked truck in the middle of the lot. A flashlight shone in our faces. A Williamson County sheriff's deputy approached us, two random passersby in the misty, humid night.

"You guys just walking through?" he said.

"We live here," Jenny and I responded in unison, giving a simultaneous thumb-jerk toward our home.

"Okay," said the cop, and he dismissed us.

We walked inside, put our things down, and returned to our front porch to watch the mayhem. When things like this happen, voyeurism can't be helped.

Two of our neighbors from down the street whose computer I fixed several months ago were talking to Officer Eric Poteet of Round Rock Police Department, who lives directly across the street from me (I live in Liberty Hill, some fifteen miles from Round Rock). Eric was lending a hand to the Williamson County deputies - laying out the crime scene tape, working crowd control, making coffee - and eventually broke off from the neighbors. They came to us and told us everything they knew. Combined with information that I had learned previously, I was able to construct this story on the matter.

—

Two houses down from Officer Poteet lives Patty Castillo. Short for Patricia. She used to be the community manager for the neighborhood before she was replaced when the property changed owners.

Patty's husband David is an Army man. He came home from Iraq a few months back, bought a new truck, and promptly dumped Patty for an Army woman he met overseas. A transfer to another platoon (whether fortunate or unfortunate is for the individual to decide) sent David back to the desert prematurely, and Patty was left broken-hearted, empty-handed, out of a job, and caring for their five daughters. She confides in my next-door neighbors, Nathan and Jenna, who watch her house when she's gone and feed Patty's dachshund Rico.

That's when she started seeing Rocky.

Rocky has rumors flying about him. He's a gang member. He's not a good guy. When provoked, his family can "take care" of people. He drinks too much. I believe all of them. His stout frame does not hold it's liquor well, and Jenna's broken furniture can attest to that.

Patty has known Rocky and Rocky's questionable family for several years, and Rocky's sudden frequent visits filled a gap left by her deserting husband. But he drank a lot. Fell down drunk on Nathan's front steps. Came over unwarranted. Had wild parties with several women in her house when she was gone. He wasn't a good guy, and Patty knew it. I know she knew it because I've witnessed plural late-night trips to Officer Poteet's house, crying into the constant wind that rushes through our streets, pleading for help or advice or assistance.

Last night, however, Patty was nowhere to be seen, but Rico could be heard barking from the other side of Nathan's glass storm door. Jenna was also not hanging around.

Yesterday marked this year's edition of Liberty Hill's annual cook-off, a festival of competitive barbecuing in downtown Liberty Hill (which is about as big as a baseball diamond, all commerce and construct considered). Patty was driving David's truck through the parking area with Rocky in the backseat.

Next to Rocky was a teenaged boy that I've seen around the neighborhood. He might be dating one of Patty's daughters, but I didn't get a chance to speak with him since he spent most of last night in the backseat of a squad car.

As she sought a parking space, twelve men on foot ambushed the truck, surrounding it completely. One of the men smashed in the back window, reached in with a knife, and stabbed Rocky three times. He took one shot in the thigh. Another in the gut. I don't know where the third landed, but it must have counted. The backseat was instantly covered in blood. The teenager's white T-shirt and blue jeans were doused.

Patty panicked. She slammed on the gas pedal to escape. The men dispersed.

Patty made for Highway 29. She thinks she ran over a pedestrian on the way out. There isn't a single news article that I can find on this matter, so this particular event is still unconfirmed. Either way, the adrenaline level in Patty's blood was so high she couldn't tell, and she made it to the highway headed east.

Between her and a hospital was our neighborhood. Due to the frenetic pace, the bleeding man in her backseat, and the teenager covered in warm, fresh blood, she wasn't thinking straight, and she stopped off at home.

Almost.

She sped David's truck straight up the driveway that leads to the empty lot between my house and Nathan's. She and the teen combined efforts to transport Rocky into her minivan, and she took off. The teen was left behind.

He banged on Nathan's door and explained the situation. It was later said by Officer Poteet, through a nervous bodily sway and eyes that never quite met mine and seemed to want to just give up, that "Nathan exercised very poor judgement tonight." Nathan retrieved from his house a shop vacuum and began to use it on the backseat, sucking up blood from the cloth interior.

It never would have worked. Not after five minutes of the blood setting in. Not after five seconds. But he tried.

Officer Poteet saw all of this go down from his bedroom window, and came out to extract the full story from Nathan. He staggered across the street in a decidedly authoritative way. Nathan divulged the information after a few minutes of basic interrogation.

Williamson County was called. The cops arrived on the scene. Rocky was checked into a hospital, and has been reported in critical but stable condition. To my knowledge, no one has been arrested. It's entirely possible that Nathan will be charged for his evidence destruction attempts.

As mentioned before, Rocky's family is an unruly bunch, and can make things happen that make news headlines. The locals are all muttering from muted mouths that Rocky's pregnant sister is next on the list, followed by Patty herself.

The fear of retaliation amongst people who know any of the involved parties is soft, but strong. It's a fear of speaking fears out loud, I believe. A paranoia of paranoia. I fear that Patty has just become the neighborhood pariah.

She has a computer that I was going to fix.

I don't think I'll do it anymore.

A note to all Internet users

2009-04-09T18:28:00.001-05:00

When you recieve a forwarded or spam email that makes bold claims with highly accusatory language and has no listing of sources, please do some research before sending it on to five dozen other people as if it's fact. I received this email from my dad tonight. I've left the forwarding formatting intact because I'm too damn lazy to remove it all.

Information to note no matter what your political leanings are.

Subject: Fw: Read this and weep

    :

    >
    > RE: Obama Signs Presidential
    > Determination Allowing Palestinians Loyal to Hamas to
    > Resettle in US
    >
    > Here is yet another unilateral
    > action taken by our new President, for which we must rely
    > upon the information of friends to discover.  I wonder how
    > the "Jewish" block of Democratic voters now feels
    > about their choice for President.
    >
    >
    > Try and tell the American people that Obama doesn't
    > have ties to the Islamic terrorist world.   Obama funds
    > $20M tax payer dollars to immigrate Hamas Refugees  to the
    > USA
    >  
    > This is the news that didn't make the headlines...
    >
    >  
    > By executive order, President Barack Obama has ordered the
    > expenditure of $20.3 million in migration assistance to the
    > Palestinian refugees and conflict victims in Gaza . The
    > "presidential determination" which allows hundreds
    > of thousands of Palestinians with ties to Hamas to resettle
    > in the United States was signed on January 27 and appeared
    > in the Federal Register on February 4.
    >
    >  
    > Few on Capitol Hill took note that the order provides a
    > free ticket replete with housing and food allowances to
    > individuals who have displayed their overwhelming support of
    > the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the parliamentary
    > election of January 2006.
    >
    >  
    > A review of Barack Obama's most recent actions since he
    > was inaugurated: 
    >
    > His first call to any head of
    > state as president was to Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah
    > party in the Palestinian territory.  His first one-on-one
    > interview with any news organization was with Al Arabia
    > television. He ordered Guantanamo Bay closed and all
    > military trials of detainees halted.  He ordered all
    > overseas CIA interrogation centers closed.  He withdrew all
    > charges against the masterminds behind the USS Cole and
    > 9/11. Now we learn that he is allowing hundreds of thousands
    > of Palestinian refuges to move to and live in the US at
    > American taxpayer expense.
    >
    >
    > To verify for yourself: www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2009-02-04-E9-2488
    >
    >  
    > PLEASE PASS THIS ON... AMERICA NEEDS TO KNOW!

This is what I wrote in response, and what I wish people would do before sending me shit like this in the first place:

—

Before anybody starts to believe this simply because it's written in very leading language (the conservative media does this, then whines that there is no conservative media), you should take a look at some of these documents:

This is nothing new. Here's an article from a Snopes-like site disputing this email. Since this site does not have the long-standing reputation that Snopes has, and since it provides very few links, I was reluctant to trust it. Here's that link anyway: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/o/obama-palestine-refugees.htm

So I started looking things up. The Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance (ERMA) Fund is defined in a subsection of a law that was passed in 1967. Here's that law. For the specific section, look at section (c): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/22/2601.html

President Obama has legitimately signed the executive order to send money overseas to Palestinian refugees under the terms of this law. This doesn't mean that he's passed any new laws or changed any existing laws, only that he enacted the power that was invested in him to appropriate these funds in 1967. Here's his actual executive order: http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-2488.htm

Here's an article from America.gov detailing the who's, what's, and why's of the order: http://www.america.gov/st/foraid-english/2009/January/20090130104608dmslahrellek0.2651483.html

Furthermore, Obama's not the first president to use this order to provide relief to the Palestinians. As a matter of fact, George W. Bush used this act to provide identical relief more than once during his terms. At the end of this paragraph, you'll find a link to a transcript of a speech Bush gave where he admits to authorizing more than four times the expenditure that Obama has authorized for this purpose. By this logic, he's four times the Israeli terrorist that Obama is. By electing Obama, we've reduced the Israeli-terroristism in the Oval Office by 75%. Don't believe me? Here's that transcript: http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2009/01/02/transcript-president-george-w-bush-radio-address-gaza-crisis-fault-of-hamas-january-2-3-2009/

I'm also adding a few people to the list of email addresses, just so nobody else gets snagged into believing the kind of filth that gets permeated via email. You throw away ads for "male enhancement" that offer roughly the same amount of truth as this email. So there's the research. There's the proof. Say it ain't so.

And as for the laundry list of Obama's first actions as president, at least he wasn't clearing brush at his ranch and playing golf.

Where did all the good guys go?

2009-03-18T13:03:00.002-05:00

I got pulled over the other day by a Williamson County deputy.

Again.

It was roughly three in the morning on Monday. I was driving home from work. I was not speeding. I was in control of my car. You could hardly call me drowsy. You can imagine my frustration after having been pulled over and ticketed no less than three times in the past year. What could I have possibly done wrong to warrant being pulled over by a cop who had been illegally parked on the side of the highway without any lights on?

License plate lamps.

There is something fundamentally wrong with this. I can get fined for having blasted license plate lights, and though the "justice" system files it away under Compliance™, I'm stuck paying a fine out of the "one bad apple spoils the bunch" principle. The white trash assholes who kidnap their daughters and drive cross-country with them in what always seems to be a white pickup truck are always tagged by license plate numbers, meaning I have to keep my plate lit up so the cops can know that I'm not such a white trash asshole. If I fail in this duty, I get fined. Somewhere in Williamson County, as I'm being pulled over, a child is being raped.

Don't tell me that after you've already pulled me over and you've got your headlights shining and your patriot red-white-blue alerters spinning and your special side-mounted spotlight blinding me with the brightness of twelve suns that you can't read my license plate. I won't believe you.

Just so you know, I didn't get ticketed for having my lamps out because I didn't know they were out. After discovering that, Deputy Cole tried to tag me for an outdated insurance card, but thanks to the power of the Internet in my palm-sized G1 phone I was able to produce up-to-date information -- proof of financial responsibility, as they call it. Failing to charge me with anything so far, he ran my driver's license.

Suspended.

Yes, yes, I know. I mean, I didn't know, but I might have guessed. I've been fighting this technicality in the system since 2005. I was pulled over in San Antonio in August of that year because of a sheer bad luck type of incident where a school zone sign was kinda obscured behind about seven dump trucks overfull with gravel straight from the quarry. I didn't see it. I went forty-five in a thirty-five. Busted. No insurance. In Texas, that's a surchargin'! So after beginning to pay off my ridiculous $400+ fine and waiting for my court date to arrive, I wound up in the hospital for ten days. I missed that court date. Since sometime around there, my license has been repeatedly suspended for no good reason. I must have paid that surcharge three times by now. Not to mention what happened that following December when I called the cops to report that my car had been broken into, and then got arrested for a failure to appear in court.

Worst. Hospital stay. Ever. For what it's worth, I was taken to a holding tank where I spent seven hours surrounded by federal PMITA prison inmates serving bench warrants and fighting quite violently. The guy who stole my CDs and my checkbook from the car was never picked up. They found another guy who had gotten a few of my checks from the guy who did the break-in. They claimed he could not be questioned by San Antonio PD because he was arrested and detained in a tiny city with a total area of roughly fourteen square inches called Leon Valley, and they've got their own PD.

At any rate, my horrible, evil crime that warrants an illegal parking job on the side of a highway at 3 AM just to catch me turned out to be driving on a suspended licence.

I must say that, despite my frustrations, Deputy Cole has been my least annoying cop experience to date. But even with him, we begin to see the parody that police departments make of the justice system.

Williamson County tickets more than Travis County. Liberty Hill, Leander, and Cedar Park Police Departments ticket more than Austin. Why? Because they're small districts that simply don't have the population necessary to fund themselves naturally through property taxes and the tickets that would normally be accrued if the police weren't wolfing after every citizen.

In other words, policing has become a strange type of corporate venture, one that doesn't have to bother with customer service. The cops certainly won't lose their jobs for harrassing more citizens, even though the citizens are the ones who populate their paychecks.

This all makes me think of all those perfect families and characters that Norman Rockwell painted. What happened to the days of Norman Rockwell cops who walked around casually swinging their batons in loop-de-loops while whistling a happy tune and taking care of families? Did those men ever exist? What happened to serving the community? The only things cops serve communities with anymore are citations, but there's really nothing that can be done about it. If I complained about either of my particular incidents, all I'd hear is, "You shouldn't have missed your court date," or, "You shouldn't have been driving with a suspended license."

Mark it as a sign of the times that police departments no longer serve communities, but instead serve the government-operated companies they report to.

Allow me to indulge myself

2009-02-26T00:00:00.001-06:00

Let's assume for a moment that I am not a cynical atheist who likes to examine my concepts of truth by inciting or involving myself in arguments with people who I know or think will disagree with me. Suppose for a moment that I discarded my trust in science and my faith in the scientific process and my extreme distrust in published statistics.

Let's assume for a moment that I am, in fact, Catholic, and that I heard about Pope Benedict XVI's recent suggestion that indulgences might be making a comeback to the Catholic church. What might my initial thoughts be?

Jesus, I can't do this. I can't pretend to be Catholic. So you're just going to have to suffer through my cynicism. Sorry.

For a full definition and description of what "indulgences" are, look here. In brief, the Catholic church began exchanging indulgences for money back during their Crusades. Paying money to the Catholic church for an indulgence meant that the time your soul would spend in purgatory, being cleansed (painfully) of its sins before entering Heaven, would be reduced. A plenary indulgence could be paid, which would eliminate this time entirely.

Wait. What?

You're telling me that a certain amount of currency -- that is, a human-constructed material to which only humans attribute worth -- can sometimes have value in the afterlife, when spent according to church doctrine?

Yes. Basically, that's what the cult of Catholicism was telling people during the Crusades. It doesn't make any sense, and it's utterly ridiculous. That's one reason (among many) why Martin Luther revolted against the church way back when.

Now, my cynical mind tells me that this is probably just another means for the church to fund itself. After all, indulgences were introduced during a very expensive time for the church. Contintent-wide capture and torture of ordinary human beings, with an eye trained on the unstoppable spread of a supposedly good-willed faith, doesn't ever come cheap, believe me! I understand if the church needed a bit of a financial pick-me-up. But I hardly think that making up utter bullshit like indulgences is the way to go about it. Seriously, guys. Host a bake sale. A bazaar. Anything. Just don't tell me that I can pay my way out of hell before I even get there using money, which would have no value in such a place.

Indulgences have been mostly gone for quite some time now, but the pope seems to want to bring them back. He doesn't want to bring them back in the traditional sense of paying one's way out of hell. He wants to bring them back in the form of goodwill. You can request indulgences from the church if you've participated in enough community projects, devoted a significant portion of your time to generally doing good deeds, or, presumably, thrown a sufficient amount of fake bloody fetuses at abortion clinics.

I guess the point here is to suggest that by doing good deeds, your soul can be cleansed in the here and now, in the present sentience of your soul.

Well, it's accomplished by doing good deeds and then asking for the indulgence. Maybe you'll have that granted to you. The only funny thing about this is that you have to ask. Simply devoting your entire life to the welfare of your fellow human beings is not enough to keep you from burning in a few eternities of bubbling magma, granite melted from the fires of hell, which are there to remind you that you could have done better, dammit! Now you have to ask the Catholic church permission to consider all of your positive effects on the world verifiable good deeds. The Catholic church, in other words, has taken the liberty of inserting themselves into the process as the judge of those deeds. They're basically a self-appointed middleman with no other organization arguing the point. The Buddhists aren't exactly chomping at the bit over it.

An extrapolation of this act can be interpreted this way: The Catholic church has gone from selling indulgences as a method of funding a massive, torture-based religious conversion campaign to attempting to make the general population believe that no matter how many good things they do in their life, no matter how many people they help, no matter how many well-meaning organizations they help along, their entire life will be for naught if they're not Catholic.

No matter what they call it, it's obvious that they simply want your money. You seek out the church in the false hope that your life will suddenly have meaning (and indulgences prove that the Catholic church is all about that kind of advertisement), but you suddenly find that they expect a portion of your paycheck once a week. It keeps the priests fed and sheltered, and also pads the wallet of the world's largest and most profitable international corporation. Think about it. If every Catholic in the world (approximately one billion) donates only five dollars every Sunday, that means that the Catholic church is raking in approximately five billion dollars per week. Perhaps the magnitude of this number is better expressed in digits.

$5,000,000,000 per week

My paycheck is worth less than $1,000 per week. That is a puny number compared to the undeniable wealth of the Catholic church. It's simply unbelievable.

Furthermore, recent counts show less than one million Catholic priests and nuns in the world. That works out to $5,000 per week per Catholic servant, the eqivalent of a $260,000 yearly salary. I thought these people were supposed to be sacrificing themselves? Yet they earn almost ten times the amount I earn, and I get along just fine. I hardly think that the brothers and sisters of the faith actually see that much money in a week. So where does the excess go? To the wallets of the Vatican. Guess the upkeep on torture devices is more than I thought. Either that, or God is becoming steadily more greedy over the years, which might explain the need for more followers. I wouldn't know. I've never spoken to Him. I can't. Because He doesn't exist.

For whatever reason, they think they need more followers. Are indulgences the way to do this? Who knows? The last time they offered them, it was the 15^th century, and it's hard to guage if indulgences or iron maidens were the leading cause of Catholic converts.

I guess they figured they can't get away with injuring people for money anymore. The folks they're granting indulgences to these days, those men and women who protect human rights and prevent animal suffering and feed the hungry Somalians, well, they kinda take offense to it.

Despite how infuriated I get when I hear news of this sort, I'm really laughing. It's a sad kind of laugh, sure. I laugh the same way when reading up on last year's Darwin Award winners. It has something to do with people who feel their life is so insignificant that they need to do something really stupid to get attention. Even when laughing, though, I wish that a place like hell really existed, so all of these bastards could burn in it.

Justice, America Style

2009-02-24T15:46:00.001-06:00

Two recent pieces of news have caught my eye. Allow me to transcribe some basic facts of each case here, just as a setup to a juxtaposition.

Across the country, ten people have now died due to the salmonella infestation of three peanut butter plants (so far). According to various news sources, the salmonella infestations have been due to a combination of things, including the plant operators' inability or unwillingness to keep the place clean and the FDA's failure to inspect these plants in roughly five years. The media is drowning in recalls, and the fact that such a massive recall is happening has put the focus of the media onto the recall and related news, like ConAgra's subsequent bankruptcy.

At the same time, Michael Phelps has recently taken some heat over a photograph that leaked out to the public of him taking a hit off a bong at a party:

But it's not just him. So far, eight people who were present at the party have been charged with possession of marijuana. Michael Phelps is not one of them. Nevermind the fact that a picture of Michael Phelps smoking pot from a water pipe is not enough reason to search the property of people who were not in the photo (a clear breach of due process). The fact that Phelps, the only one for which solid evidence to that end exists, has not been charged yet says a great deal about the nature of celebrity and the way the American Justice System™ treats it.

These two news particles have almost nothing to do with each other.

Almost.

You see, on the one hand we have ten deaths due to a company's negligence to follow the ethical process of cleaning the machinery that feeds tens of millions of people across the country and the FDA's apparent ability to shirk their federally mandated duties. That's called manslaughter, but nobody's been charged for it. In fact, the news circulating the country regarding these incidents has mostly stopped lately. On the other hand, we have eight people arrested because a single person (who has not been arrested or charged) smoked some pot. They didn't kill anybody. They didn't maim anybody. Their intentions were not even malicious. Let me simplify this further:

10 people dead = 0 arrests
0 people dead, injured, or forced to do anything against their will = 8 arrests

Is this starting to come together, now?

This doesn't make sense to me, and the fact that Phelps first acknowledged, and then apoligized for his act, infuriates me. Phelps should not have apologized. He should have admitted to doing it, then pointed out that (at least) eight other people did it that night as well and that nobody was hurt because of their activities, and then he should have promptly hopped on the Legalize Weed Bandwagon. Nothing hurts us more, especially in a time of economic crisis, than the excessive government spending involved with the arrest, conviction, and prolonged incarceration of people who have decided to do a drug less harmful than some legal ones I can think of (alcohol, anybody?). Matter of fact, I think that part of this whole "let's arrest everyone at the party" thing has spawned out of fear -- fear that someone can actually smoke pot and still win eight gold medals for swimming. To think that pot is not a determining factor in a person's success or failure in life (or, god forbid, that it might have a positive effect on a person's life) is a True American Crime™. People are afraid of pot because our ridiculous government has been on and on about how marijuana is the fucking antichrist since Richard Nixon started his even more ridiculous "War on Drugs," which only serves to create crime, and doesn't provide any benefit to the country or its population whatsoever.

This is the perfect time for such exposure, too. It looks like California might be legalizing weed before too long. All I ask is that the country put some serious thought into this, and maybe use such a juxtaposition of media releases as this one to base their arguments on. I'll leave you with some extended reading.

Calif. lawmaker introduces bill to legalize pot

Michael Phelps acknowledges pot pipe photo and apologizes

Michael Phelps calls USA Swimming suspension fair

Peanut product recalls

More peanut product recalls

Salmonella Sickness Now Linked To Texas