The Suicidal Cactus Hour

What gets missed in the SOPA debate...

2012-01-19T15:58:00.001-05:00

Rick Santorum is hardly my favorite human being. He is a representative of a brand of "Conservatism" that is abhorrent to me. A religious zealot who preaches that we need good Conservative leadership, and then proceeds to advance radicalized ideas of imposition of theocratic controls, promote monopolist interests, and all in the name of "safety" and "freedom."

In a post SOPA Blackout world, that many across the Web didn't get--I point to the folks who misinterpreted Drew Curtis' "White Out" as support and obviously didn't actually read the whole statement or even click the linked video that simply read: You can't. It's evil--and I realize that during the discussion, some things about the bill really have been glossed over.

For Lulz, here's Rick's defense of SOPA as framed that freedom of speech is too free and against good American values...

For Lulz, here's Rick's defense, on the grounds that too much freedom is against good old fashioned American values.

First off, let's just get Rick's misapprehensions about freedom of speech out of the way. That already disqualifies him from my vote in any, way, shape or form.

Free speech isn't about speech that is easy. It's not about speech that is agreeable. Freedom of speech is about speech that annoys you. Offends you. Pisses you off.

Most of our freedoms are about the right to piss other people off.

Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom to assemble. All about pissing off people. Especially people in power. Especially about pissing off the majority. It is to guarantee the freedom of folks to be contentious, inappropriate, and above all, to disagree with those around them.

That doesn't mean the freedom from being disagreed with, rather, it is a protection to be able to disagree, and not have the full weight of the government come down upon you, because someone has the ear of a Congresscritter or Governor or other member of the state. American freedoms aren't about the right to be free of hurt feelings and to be free from argument, they are about preserving those arguments, and allowing the tide of public opinion to turn on that very public.

Freedom of speech, freedom of religion are about keeping the state out of public arguments. About keeping the government the Hells out of such things, and letting people decide for they own damn selves.

Freedom of speech has never been about the freedom from butthurt. Our entire nation was based on the premise that here you could be as big a dick to folks who piss you off, and they can be as big a dicks as they want to you, and the government can't back either, but let you have all the knock down, drag out, public brawls about issues, and when the dust settles, the government treats you both the same, and let the majority vote their way about policy, so long as it doesn't violate some basic principles of fairness.

We can't, even if we have a majority, vote this a "Christian nation." We can't, even if we have a majority, tell folks that they can't belong to an organization that hasn't broken any laws, but pisses folks off by its existence.

The sad fact is, some folks think that our freedoms are freedoms to protect them from being disagreed with, when they are in, in the spirit of this nation, the freedom to disagree. Loudly. To sing it to the Heavens, to tell it the mountains, to whisper it to the rivers. To disagree, and piss other folks off.

That essential premise is what this nation is based upon, and it sets our national character. We are a rambunctious, fractious, argumentative, boisterous republic. Our national character was set when we told the East India to stop colluding with our government to fix prices and stifle competition. Our very Bill of Rights is about preserving that spirit, and if that pisses you off: good. That's the f*cking point.

Now that we have those particulars out of the way, let's get onto the meat of SOPA. Look at Tipper Gore. Democrats and Republicans both run the gamut on this. And they're both wrong on the issue of infringing freedom of speech for the same reason. It is about control. It is about limiting freedom in the name of safety. Safety for our children. Safety for our friends and political fellow travelers. It is about trading a little freedom for safety. In this case, it's actually worse, because it is less about safety than convenience. It is about making things easier to manipulate and control by limiting what folks can bring to bear against you.

One of the things that has been coming up, be it Santorum, be in Gingrich, or a lot of others, is that their words come back to haunt them. Their own words. Part and parcel of a new defense against this, is trying to classify those words put out into the public, can be restricted under the aegis of copyright. It's not entirely new, but it is a growing sort of concern, when you see companies that record said words--our news agencies--as considering their content as protected from being repeated. Quotation as infringement. SOPA and PIPA are part and parcel of an attempt to gag quotation. Not just muzzle things that offend folks. Not just keep you from the concept of fair use, but an end run around folks who dislike the idea that their own words come back to haunt them.

It's not about just infringement, but also about controlling the digital record, which is increasingly becoming a sort of Akashic Record of every politician's positions. If you only appear on friendly networks, only appear on record with those who will support and then ask for those who quote you to be expunged, you control message. Controlling message is what politicians desire the most, especially in an age when your words fly into the ether, and folks can compare and contrast. Directly. Themselves.

That is the real danger with SOPA. It is an obtuse way to control message. You quote someone who appears on Fox? You'd best have permission to use said clip. Don't? You can get your message shut down, without so much as a hearing. It is not just about copyrighted material like movies or TV shows, or books, but about controlling what content you can use as ammunition against someone and controlling the records themselves.

This is real danger. Not that you can have your site yanked because you used an image that Time Warner wanted a penny for, but because it can be used as a bludgeon to dun folks who dare to use quotations that would show hypocrisy, and allow politicians to continue to be hoist on their own petard, and their own words.

We saw it in the last election cycle, when Palin tried clumsily to try to classify her words as protected from being repeated. With SOPA/PIPA, you will have to contend with a lot more hoops to repeat things. It's not about being PC, but about controlling message.

As much as SOPA/PIPA is being touted, it is part of a multi-staged approach. The extension of copyright is likewise another avenue. It is about control of media, and absolute control.

I'm a member of the NWU. Part of the issues that the writer's union faces right now, are the control of contracts and control of distribution. We are fast approaching a point where authors won't need distributors to get their stuff out. Kindles, and the like, we are approaching a time when authors will be able to distribute their work without publishing houses. Can form their own distribution networks, do their own PR, and otherwise bypass the model that we have today.

Large publishing houses, and the same for large film distributors realize this. Contracts are increasingly draconian about work already in the hands of those houses and more, they are getting even tetchier about distribution and who actually owns those rights.

Authors grant rights to those houses. For a percentage of the sales. When you don't need those houses to publish, it's going to be a much hairier market. And folks realize this, and what we are seeing here, is a way to combat that, and head it off at the pass. Especially, if you stay small--and thus don't have access to the hordes on Intellectual Property lawyers who will look for anything looking like the barest hint of infringement, and SOPA/PIPA are great tools for that. To keep folks with intellectual property on the reservation.

It's not being talked about in this fashion. It's being discussed in much smaller terms, and that is, in part, because the companies that own the larger media houses don't want folks to realize the real shot off the bow for intellectual property that it is.

Besides the control of message for politicians--which is a way to get them on board--but all out assault on keeping authors of intellectual property from straying and forming their own entities. Be that with Creative Commons. Be that forming their own online publishing co-ops. Forming their own independent studios and distribution channels.

SOPA/PIPA are just part of an effort to keep the middlemen in charge, when they are creaking towards obsoleteness.

What bugs me about this issue is that as a bill to decrease piracy, it will actually not do a lot. There are work arounds for the folks who are into piracy as a means to defraud and make money for it. This won't prevent folks from selling you bootleg DVDs in the least.

What it does, and what isn't discussed, is pretty much insure that intellectual property creators will be forced to stay under the fold of larger houses for protection, distribution, and stay relatively docile as the technology is addressed.

It is a massively anticompetitive effort, and that is not really discussed in this debate. Because porn and people getting booted for snatching pics of LOLcats is more fun, but at the heart of this matter, is a stab at anything resembling organization by artists and intellectual property creators coming together to form their own houses/collectives, and market their work directly.

The establishment is slow. Scott Kurtz addressed this recently with his strip with the nice folks at the National Cartoonist Society finally recognizing webcomics after how many years? The establishment has been trying to consider e-commerce as both new and exciting, and with the same models as print. And they aren't. Much as the music industry was slow to recognize the digital commerce applications for music. In the interim, lots of folks leaped and skipped across the landscape as folks realized the potential for market outreach, far and away beyond what the suits who are invested in old models were contemplating.

SOPA/PIPA is a measure that realizes that potential, and wants to hate it out of existence.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose.

Blowing Away Some New Year's Blues...

2011-12-29T08:14:00.000-05:00

The Shofar is not a traditional instrument, but I think it is a good symbol for this feeling that I tend to get around this time of the year. Not that I'm Jewish. Not that I want to co-opt their ceremony or its tools or ceremonies. But I do think that maybe the larger culture in America could do with something on the lines of the High Holy days that lead up to Yom Kippur. Especially, as I sit in this sort of post Christmas malaise that I tend to roll into.

This isn't a post about the ebbils of The War on Christmas. Or the Commercialization of Christmas. Or even the Post Christmas Bloat of so much salt and sugar being consumed whilst sitting near a TV. It is maybe inspired a bit from that, but every year, around this time, I do slip into a bit of a brown study. Christmas is over, and the New Year's celebrations beckon, and in between, you have a week of thought collection and recollection, and taking stock of what has occurred, what you hope for the next year, the last year has been a bit of a weird ride.

This is usually the time when I make calls to folks. Folks I haven't spoken to in years. Not everyone that I've wronged by any means--that's not a short list, and I'm not that good of a man--but I do tend to focus on folks that I've not appreciated as much as I should. Or rather, told that I appreciate. Which is odd, since after the aneurysm I promised myself that I'd not go to my grave with regrets. I failed in that--we get busy, we figure we have another day, those days turn into weeks, those weeks into months, and then there's a gulf of time that we are shamed of. I understand the process, and why it happens, but prideful, I am always shocked when I look back and realize how often I've let this sort of debt build up.

In that, I do envy my Jewish friends and neighbors for their Day of Atonement. The fasting and the rest put a ceremony to putting things right. While Yom Kippur was some time ago, I tend to fall into a state where I want to put things right looking onto the New Year, and begin fresh. This is that time for that, and while I realize that Rosh Hashanah occurs every year, I sometimes think that the rest of America misses out on something when we celebrate our New Year with an orgy of booze and fireworks and kissing strangers. Not that I don't like the time, nor will I say no if someone hands me a glass or five, but maybe we short change ourselves a bit, with less ceremony as we ramp up this end of the year.

Ceremony has power. It reinforces. It strengthens bonds. It brings communities together. It, more importantly, gives you the space to consider. Going back to Hebrew tradition, the concept of selah, a mark during prayers to pause, either for musical interlude, or to pause and reflect. Our ceremonies are a way of doing that in a larger sense. They give us permission to stop all the usual crap that we run around with, and take a moment or two to consider. That's sort of the point. Be that the singing of the National Anthem before a sporting event, or saying grace before a family meal, or touching gloves before a match, these giving of moments are important, and this is a time when I try to give maybe in a less formal sense some time to consider. And maybe wish for something more formalized to give a deeper meaning to getting all maudlin at this time.

I won't get to everyone this year. I know this; the list is too damn long, and I am not a good man. But if you happen to meet me rolling down the street, and I look a little preoccupied, it's not just the holiday running around, and I apologize for maybe being a little off my game. I hope y'all have a great year. I hope that this coming one is a damn sight better than the last. And for those of you that I've wronged, or taken for granted, I am actually thinking on that, and taking stock, and if I don't get to you this year, know that I haven't forgotten. I'm just shamed that it's taken so long...

Snark Done Right

2011-12-23T10:20:00.000-05:00

Minneapolis, Minnesota's City Pages published a letter to recently resigned state Senator Amy Koch. Koch, resigned after an affair with a male staffer. Koch was deeply involved in the fight to put a Constitutional Amendment before Minnesota to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

John Medeiros' letter follows:

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry. And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of “adultery.”

Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that “gay marriage” is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone’s family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.

Thank you.
John Medeiros
Minneapolis MN

That is how you snark someone who has made it her mission to preach to folks on how to run their lives, what is appropriate, and caught not just with her pants down, but wronging her faith and constituents.

I am a proponent of marriage equality. I may be a Republican, but no where in that republicanism, does it mean that I support denying citizens rights. It doesn't mean that I want to see the First Amendment crumpled up into a wee ball, and tossed to the side. I have strong respect for those of faith, I have strong faith myself, but that doesn't mean that ministries and churches have the right to impose their own readings of text on others. Be they Unitarians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Pagans, Scientologists, Hindus, Muslims, and most especially those without faith. That is really the crux of things. Freedom of religion is the freedom to practice whatever faith, and be free from others imposing their views of religion upon you.

The thrust of any argument against marriage equality has been that it tears apart family values. Makes them meaningless. Because, as we all know, if someone believes differently than you, and is not a part of your congregation, their actions impact and lend meaning to your own by leaching into the ether, just by simply being...

What I have touched on before, is that we are entering a time, when folks are forgetting their vows. This is a danger to the nation. When folks consider their vows to be inconvenient to their lives, they cast them aside. Lately, it isn't just that of marriage that is getting tossed aside, but every time we said the Pledge of Allegiance, we promised to extend the blessings of the republic to all of our people. Liberty and justice for all. Not just the folks who make us comfortable or agree with us. Not just the folks who pray the way we do. For all. We swore to uphold the republic as indivisible, as one nation. Not Real America and Faux America, but one. A lot of folks have forgotten that pledge. A lot of folks seem in a hurry to tout what they believe the Founding Fathers would want us to do, by tossing aside the very Bill of Rights. There are those who want to see the Ten Commandments be engraved on the side of every State House in the nation, and yet seem to forget those pesky things say: Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not steal. And work tirelessly to defend folks who break those very Commandments, and apologize for them.

We have in a race right now for President, Newt Gingrich, who wants to define marriage, yet cannot stay within one himself, at least not without breaching that vow. His own actions sully the institution far more than partners who have stayed faithful for years, without the blessings of the church, and denied the same rights to marry as their brethren and sistren, by dint of who they love. That folks leap to this man, who wants to take the highest job in the nation, and swear to the nation that he will execute those duties faithfully, cannot himself even keep a promise to his own wife, and certainly not to even his own God to forswear all others.

That inability to keep promises, when they become inconvenient is what threatens marriage. It is indicative of what is deeply wrong within my party. The inability to keep promises made. That is the rift that exists. Not "homosexuals threatening the sanctity of marriage!" but folks who threaten the sanctity of any vows by their willingness to toss them aside for convenience. No matter to who. Be that a promise to God. Be that a promise to your wife. Be that a promise to your constituents. Be that a promise to your nation. Be that a promise made to your fellow Congresscritters to deal fairly. THIS hypocrisy is the disease that eats at the party, and the nation. Projecting that onto folks who only want to stand with their partners, who want to sing their love to the mountaintops, that saddens me a great deal.

And so, when John wrote his wee letter, he touched on all that, and twisted the knife a little, and made that sad turn into a wee bit of schadenfreude. Which is perhaps a bit better than succumbing to backpfeifengesicht--German for "face that needs a fist" which is a term that we NEED to bring into common parlance and I ask you to spread it far and wide.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Butt and Switch? Yes, a Similar Theme...

2011-12-22T08:26:00.001-05:00

Today I am inspired by Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner's tirade against Michelle Obama's temerity to say to the nation, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't shove EVERYTHING down our fat gobs and maybe exercise every now and then." His defense? "She has a large posterior." Yup, he went to "she got a big ass" as his go to point.

Let's take a look at that tochis for a moment.

Yes, I went for a gratuitous butt shot of the First Lady. I am, if nothing else, wicked classy. It is to make a point though. Michelle Obama is not a svelte and elfin gal. She is a solid built woman. Not a small gal, but hardly what you'd call large. She is a woman in her 40s who looks pretty good.

Let's take a look at the Congressman who made the shot.

...yeah.

Now then, before I start to make unkind notations about front butt and his love of Cheetos--something that the article alludes to, and is no real secret--the Wisconsin House Representative is actually on the House Science Committee. He WAS on the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, until the Committee was killed off. I could make unkind cuts on his introduction of US PATRIOT--an act he didn't write, but certainly has supported over the years. I could point to his vote against aid to Katrina victims that GW Bush signed. I could point to his intransigence over seeking to deny the widow of a US Marine legal immigration, with their son, after her husband was killed in Iraq. I could point to these things, and say very unkind things. But, likewise, you can praise the man for standing with Nancy Pelosi as the only Republican to greet the Dali Lama in 2008 to protest China's treatment of Tibet. While Sensenbrenner has had his controversies, this particular flap is not so much telling of the man, than our times.

This is an issue that folks are creating waves on, simply to create waves.

Slim Goodbody. Mr. Rogers suggested healthy snacks. Sesame Street suggests healthy snacks and exercising. The Presidential Council on Physical Fitness. This is manufactured flack, because it is Michelle Obama picking up an idea that has been around for a long while. Not during just Democratic Presidencies. But since frippin' Ford's days.

Mind you, there IS pushback against the concept just on ideological bounds, but on the companies that are making inroads to putting their products in front of kids all the time in the form of soda and drink machines. Clearly defined product endorsements, and products directly dropped into school lunch programs, that are EASY to produce, and fairly cheap to provide, but lets face it, processed foods are not generally grand sources of nutrition. Which is kind of the point.

School lunch programs make up millions in sales in each state. They are a captive market, and a source of state and Federal funds. These programs are ripe targets for some companies looking to expand, not waistlines, but their profit margins. That their products aren't really good for you...that's a pesky, niggling sort of thing. There are dollars to be made, and Congresscritters to pay to help swing contracts their way. And when someone suggests that maybe we NOT feed our kids a bunch of processed crap with extra corn syrup, a lot of empty calories, salt, and fat for the f*ck of it, that scares the folks whose job it is to sell that stuff, and who just happened to get the grand idea that schools were a great market.
It is a confluence of very real financial impact to folks who figured that schools were going to be easy marks, and the folks who are going to oppose anything that comes from the President or his family. If it were immunization, there would be a confluence of folks who would get up in arms about the gub'ment telling us how to raise our chil'runs, and the vaccine crowd would get tapped to crow about it. If it were raising awareness about abuse, then folks would be screaming how we can't discipline our kids without the Big Government poking its nose in our bid'ness! The rumblings are out there, and there are folks to oppose nearly any issue, if it comes from the President or near him. If, tomorrow, the President were to propose a day celebrating NASCAR and apple pie I'm sure that there would be a huge uproar against the hypocrisy of looking to reduce climate change gases and support of racing, and the elitist "Stock Car" racing that average Americans can't possibly compete in, while simultaneously frothing about the celebration of invasive species introduced across a virgin America and the supremacy of European pie, when the obviously older fry bread and churro were overlooked, and how dare the Office of the President slander the fine Latin and Native communities...

Opposition on the basis of a policy proposed by the Executive is nothing new. That it DOES have real financial impact is likewise not surprising. Burying the opposition because it might make you look like sort of petulant child who is a shill for an industry looking to shove even MOAR crap down our kids' gobs...that's a special sort of fun poking. Because, the issue isn't, as some are going to run with, that he called the First Lady a fatass, but that he opposes her agenda on grounds that she is the wife of the President, and that any movement to get healthier kids could mean endangering contracts with school lunch programs and reducing consumer spending on crap. Like the Cheetos that he so dearly loves.

Mind you, I LOVE Cheetos too. Not the puffy ones, but the crinkly dense suckers. It's salt and fat in a handy corn medium, and they ARE tasty. Let's not get that screwed up. But the opposition to the First Lady's agenda from several sources stems two fold, and it's not really being discussed. While trying to frame the opposition as being about "parents' rights to parent" and "big government" it boils down to simple opposition for opposition's sake, and "big government" is fine so long as it spends money on campaign sponsor's crap. That his opposition is two fold, is far more subtle than some would give the man credit for. I am feeling generous though...

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Terra Nova was a Bait and Switch?

2011-12-21T10:39:00.000-05:00

Yes, Korea's dictator for life has died. Newt is plunging at the polls. Huntsman may run as a Libertarian. There is important stuff going on in the world, but I assume that folks are heading to boards like Fark or debating endlessly on Facebook on these topics. I decided to take on a different subject.

Terra Nova was a surprise for me. Not that it snuck up on me, I've been there pretty much from the first episode, but what I am appreciating about it, is how the writing staff lured us in with the characters. With the plot arcs. It's not the best series on TV right now--I still hand that one to Dexter for smart writing and characters that while not always likable, they are internally consistent. Something that is rare on TV nowadays.

Terra Nova snuck up on me, because on the surface it appears to be much like a lot of other TV series about time travel. A certain lack of regard for the laws of physics notwithstanding, and certainly a tossed away thought to causality, the show is an interesting thought experiment on how we humans could overcome our depleting our biosphere with pants on head retarded abandon.

It has all the elements. Shadowy government-corporate collusion. Authoritarians riding herd over scientists and doctors, idealistic colonists, an everyman with a family who is considered a criminal but just wants to be a Dad and protect his own, the quasi-adopted daughter of the military Commander who is in league with rogue elements and rebels.

From the get go, you are see the familiar cast of characters and figure: ...well, maybe the dinosaurs will look cool... Least that's how I approached it. It's how I looked at Primeval--another show that plays around with causality and time loops and physics and twists them up like a kitten with a ball of string--though, without a Spielbergian budget for their dinosaurs. To be fair, when you get dinosaurs involved in a series, you almost always get quasi-governmental conspiracies, I suspect because even writers realize that few folks will believe that anyone else might pay for the housing and upkeep of the suckers when they are crossed over into our world, or we roll into theirs'. Time looping is rarely the sort of thing that TV villains ever just do on their own. It's a sort of Big Government project. Yet, when this series got off to its start, it set the archetypes down fairly thickly. Military Commander, his loyal troops, scientists with a lack of backbone, and then enters Jim Shannon, a criminal who sneaks his way across the time bridge to the Cretaceous to unite with his family. The Sixers are the rebels, the colonists are caught up in a somewhat low key struggle.

The thing is, without delving into the endless retconn of Lost very few of our characters are what they seem, even if they hew to archetype. That is refreshing to me. After the endless meandering of JJ Abrams and Jeffery Lieber's muddled plots and fabricated "surprises" it's nice to see characters develop and reveal themselves for a change on science fiction TV without the "Very Special Episode" trope that usually accompanies it. It was the strength of Babylon 5 and Farscape. It was part of reason that Firefly looked like it was going to shake out nicely. Character progression without beating us over the head with it. I don't quite compare Terra Nova to those shows--in part, because they are entirely different sub-genre--but it is nice to see that the writers payed attention. In a single season, Terra Nova became a show that looked like a few others, with slightly better production values, and is revealing itself to be its own show.

The bait and switch portion of the show is core to the plot. You can see how the show was pitched, and with the strong archetypes, you can see why execs looked up and said, "I understand this, let's do this, and with BIG dinosaurs!" The bait and switch is built into every character. From the Rod Hallet's Dr. Wallace, who figured he could schmooze his way into the heart of Shelly Conn's Dr. Elisabeth Shannon, Allison Miller's Skye, the adopted daughter of the Commander and turns out, Sixer mole--turned to protect her missing mother that the rebels have chained up with a nasty virus. Yes, it gets complicated fast, as science fiction shows tend to do. The thing is, and it's the thing that I like about the show, is that the characters, while they are presented in classic archetype fashion, they actually do remain internally consistent. We are presented with them, and make some assumptions. The viewer knows the conventions of the genre, and we're fed them on the surface. We bite, and then the characters reveal themselves, and lo, we find there's a bit more going on than we thought.

Steven Lang's Commander Taylor is the height of this. When introduced, you can't help but think, "Did they just use a bunch of out takes from Avatar to film this? The show borrows heavily from his performance on the big screen to build a shell of a character around Taylor, before you get to know the man. It's very much deliberate. Hard nosed military Commander, with a bunch of armed troops to protect the scientists and colonists, you're led to make some assumptions about the man, that the rest of the season then shows that you're almost right, and where those assumptions are wrong, they are very wrong. The same with the Sixer's Mira. Arriving in a rogue pilgrimage, she looks at first like a foil to the munificent authoritarian rule of Taylor. And that is what you're supposed to believe, because that is the sort of preconceived notion that you arrive with.

That is really what the show is about. Not wacky surprises or twists, but taking your assumptions, and playing with them. Feeding them a bit, and then showing that the internal consistency of the characters is staying true, and since you assumed wrong about the characters' motivations. It IS a show about the rapaciousness of man, of conspiracies to strip mine the past to feed the future, of a struggle to build community and make new lives. The thing is, the roles are somewhat reversed, in that the authoritarians as presented are looking to preserve their community and homes against forces that would tear them apart, and force them to desecrate their new home, and the wild rebels are tools of the technocrats in hiding. That bait and switch has been a nice reveal, because that is what it has been. A season long reveal of the characters' motivations, and while doing so, allowing them to grow into those roles a bit.

It isn't an amazing show. It's not going to knock your socks off, having you laughing, and it on the edge of your seat. It's not going to make your head bleed trying to figure out the "mystery" behind things. That alone endears the show to me--I am tired of retconn being used as a constant plot device and the Heroes/Lost sort of rewriting history at a moment's notice, I hope, has passed on. What this show is, is a nice commentary not only on our politics right now, but how we construct our ideas and make assumptions. It is a show that gives a slight pause, because it is not blindingly obviously referential, and instead drops bread crumbs for you to follow on these stereotypes in a subtle fashion that I thought was dead on American network series television. Let alone on Fox...

The season is done, and I have to say, that I am hoping that this one returns, because it's a show that has some cojones to challenge those assumptions. Not in a "screw you viewer!" that just rips up the character with some bombshell retconn, but instead has the audacity to keep characters internally consistent, and even make a gentle jape at the viewer for their own assumptions, and then let us in on the joke, with some well intentions.

Five Dollar Insight...

2011-12-16T10:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had to deposit some cash at the bank. Nothing huge, but every dollar counts these days, right?

The only problem was, not all the bills were recognized, and it pretty much illustrates the problems we face right now, not just in our everyday business, but the overall economy as well.

Dropping in cash at the bank is a pretty straightforward process. Used to be you just popped everything into an envelope, and you it all got deposited in the morning. Today, with "improvements" to the technology, you just drop bills into the machine, it reads them, and lo, instantly credited.

In theory.

That is, if the machine can read the bills. That means, the bills that aren't crumpled. The ones that are new. Haven't been used a lot. The higher the denomination, the better. Ones, fives, even ten spots, they get used and wadded up more often, and those are the ones that aren't so easy for the machines to read.

The bank decided that one of the fivers that I included wasn't good enough for a deposit. The tech couldn't read it, so it was rejected, and it went right back into my wallet. Not a big deal, but it does illustrate part of the problem that we face in the larger economy.

There is a lot of to do about tax cuts and tax breaks right now. Who gets them. What gets taxed, what gets a break, what is more valuable to the economy as a whole. There is the school of thought that prefers to give breaks and recognize only the larger transactions. Corporations and large businesses are more valuable to the general economy, in much the same way, that bills that are not in general circulation for long are easier to deal with for our banks at the ATM.

The fight against a payroll tax break is much akin. Banks don't like the idea so much, because they won't be getting an influx of large cash from corporate sources. Instead, there will be smaller amounts deposited. A lot of them. And more, with a payroll tax break, there won't be huge numbers posted to these accounts, but incremental amounts that will piled into paychecks. These smaller amounts do add up, and more, these smaller amounts will tend to go to things like paying bills. Utilities, gas, insurance, servicing credit card interest, into home loans, groceries, and small purchases. It's not sexy like dropping a few million into a single account, but like the five dollar bill, these smaller payments will circulate a bit more.

Giving large breaks to corporate sources, will mean dropping sexy amounts of cash into accounts. Akin to dropping larger amounts into bank accounts. These corporate accounts tend to head overseas, or are maintained a bit out of the chain of commerce. Put into the stock market. Put into funds that do things at a macro-economic level. Far more dynamic where the narrative heads when we talk about indicators. Bigger. Easier to track.

The problem is, economics isn't just at that macro level. What we have are issues at the local level. Demand and supply are skewed at the moment, and we see a lot of Americans carrying debt, and crushed under the weight of bills hanging, with interest building. At one level, this makes banks and utilities salivate at the thought of piling on more charges. In the long haul, it means more cash extracted from consumers. The problem being, that this strategy chokes a lot of business models by depressing purchasing, and slowing payment on debts, which slows growth, slows demand, and right now, our economy suffers from a lack of movement in cash.

The humble fiver is an illustration of this. Crumpled, not too pretty, harder to read, the bank doesn't like it so much. The thing is, that fiver goes to small purchases. It goes to the gas tank. It goes to smaller purchases. That keeps the chain of commerce going. In a similar way, these pay roll tax relief plans keep smaller amounts of cash moving as well. It provides not huge amounts of cash, but it does keep the cash moving. People pay their utilities, they buy groceries, they buy gas, they pay down credit cards, they keep the cash in circulation. They pay for small goods, which then increases demand, which spurs production. It's not as sexy as a huge government contract, it's not an order for a company wide purchase of new laptops or an agribusiness expanding their facilities, but without increased demand, without this liquidity, those larger purchases, those larger demands never show up--or if they do, they do at a cost to local investment.

We are seeing a contraction in purchasing power by the middle class. We are seeing a drop in demand for services, and in response, we have banks increasing fees to make up for that. To squeeze folks when they're down. This in turn, lowers the amount of cash that folks are able to then put into purchases, further lowering demand, and increasing the overall difficulty in getting out of the hole we've dug ourselves into.

At some point, we have to recognize the power of that ugly five dollars. We have to recognize that cash in circulation does us all more good, than just looking at the larger deposits. That we need to put cash into the hands of folks who actually buy the stuff that folks would like to sell. To use the services that folks would like to provide. That cannot happen if folks don't have that cash on hand to do so. That by looking at only the larger purchases, the larger players, that we depress demand, and only exacerbate the difficulties we find ourselves in.

That lonely, ugly fiver, it wants to go to purchases. It wants to be used. At some point, we need to recognize that those ugly fivers, when they compound over time and across the board, they add up. Not in the sexy way that twenties roll in, and count easy, but in smaller purchases that add up over time, and add up in ways that increase the ball of demand and keep the wheels greased. Not as pretty, not as easy to point to, but economics isn't pretty, and ultimately, we need those small purchases, we need the cash passed around a few times before it heads up the chain, as opposed to going straight to the large banks, straight out of circulation, and straight out of the general economy.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

B-5 and the Attack of the Ads

2011-12-15T08:50:00.000-05:00

Possibly the best part about re-watching Babylyon 5. has been not just immersing my the story, and reveling in the pure space opera, but reliving part of the consumer culture of the era.

The time was 1996. Clinton was in office. We were disentangling ourselves with Reaganomics after Bush began our climb out, and Bill Clinton was battling Congressional Republicans on near every detail of policy. Babylon 5 was begun as an independent project, out of the channel studio system, with a low budget, but writing that looked ahead in arcs previously unthought of. Brisco County Jr. gave us a young and brash Bruce Campbell. The X-Files were going strong. Deeps Space Nine was half way through its run. It was a heady time for science fiction on TV, there were cartoons galore still on TV that weren't just kid's content, MTV even showed videos on occasion.

And the ads...

The reveling for me is not the slick commercials of the major players. Not the cereal commercials, the McDonalds ads, the cologne and perfume or clothing ads, though, to be fair, I am remembering the very pale Werther's ads, and chocolate Reisen ads, and the Mentos ads as well that just can't be done today. The hair, the colors, the Mom jeans, those are all there, but for me, it's the local cable ads that are killing me the most. The DragonCon ads. The local electricians and plumbers who threw up advertisements on cable, with the most basic of electronic signage, the furniture warehouses that pulled stunts and tried so damn hard to funny. The tech schools that did put real graduates and not actors up on their ads with an earnestness that just can't be found today.

To be fair, you can't find them like that anymore, because, they are awful. Just terrible production values, not terribly effective, and embarrassing acting. But that was the age. When your local cable companies were exactly that: local. Ran locally, pulling in ads from businesses based in the community and not just from industry giants, and produced not in package deals with a bunch of other industry giants, but your local plumber said, "Hey, you know what we need? An ad here, right after the dating service girl. Damn, she's cute..." Music cued up from some guy down the street who had a keyboard and a cheap mixer, and edited in by a community college student doing his internship, and it was that very earnestness in advertising that I kind of miss.

I have pretty much sliced off my cable today. Netflix. Hulu. I don't pipe in TV the same way I did back in those days. My news comes in on the computer, I get my movies and shows directly from the source, and while I am exposed to a few ads, I limit that by making my X-Box and Mac my prime entertainment sources. It is a very different consumer entertainment environment today, but going through the tapes, I have to smile. Not just at having to run the cleaner tape, laden with alcohol, not just sheer clunkiness of the tapes--the reassuring sound as the motor slams them into overdrive to fast forward or rewind--but the knowledge that THIS was the high tech of the day. No giant flatscreens, but full size tubes on TVs that could actually kill you if they fell on you. And despite myself, sitting here with my own flatscreen TV, piping in TV on the wireless, I sort of miss those days, where your local car dealership went CRAZY with ads and DEALS!

Newt a Hypocrite? Who Knew?

2011-12-14T07:15:00.001-05:00

I know that you're all stunned by the thought of another article that shows Newt Gingrich as a double dealing asshat.

Be strong, my brothers and sisters.

It has been said that Newt Gingrich's appeal is that he sounds like what stupid people think smart people sound like. I will disagree with that, but I do think that part of his appeal is actually his own bellicosity and innate dickishness.

Newt is a smart guy. He has that pesky PhD. He is well educated, he has the ability to be eloquent, and when compared to the bumbling and stumbling of Rick Perry, he does appear to be a paragon of well spoken statesmanship. Save, when you actually listen to the man.

Newt is a bright man, who is often forced by circumstance to deal with folks that he has zero respect for. He is a bright fella who has been lauded as an "idea man" for some time, and often forced to deal with fellow former Congresscritters and journalists who are not as well educated, who are not as erudite. This is a situation that rankles the man, and it's this particular peevishness that is the real focus of this piece. Newt's own internal dickishness.

The government shutdown years ago, when Newt was offended by his seating on a plane. The recent jabs at the "invented people" of Palestine--and betting that few folks understand anything about the panethnicity of the Arabic world, the same as the Hispanic or even "white" people of the US, Canada, or Australia. Yesterday, Gary Johnson--a fella I really would love to support more, if I didn't think that his ideas on economics are only a few steps away from Ron Paul's own deludedness--took a shot at an illustrative position within the Gingrich camp. Newt supports a proposed death penalty for marijuana dealers. Those who bring in 2ozs or more, can be then dealt with harshly.

The problem is, that Newt has a storied past with Mary Jane. He has more than admitted that he has smoked pot, but has been at various times, an avid supporter of legalization. In the 80s, he wrote the AMA in support of medical marijuana. In the 90s, he told New York magazine that his use of marijuana in the 60s"...was a sign that we were alive and in graduate school in that era."

I have no problem with Newt smoking pot. It's not something that I do on a regular basis. Not a big fan of the stuff. I don't particularly care if folks smoke weed, one way or another. Do think that we waste a lot of resources on "fighting" pot, and that it is money that could be better spent on reducing the presence of actually dangerous drugs, that the current "War on Drugs" creates the very environment of danger and competition that fuels cartels, and it drastically inhibits the industrial uses of marijuana that could contribute to our economy in ways that could revitalize a few industries.

So, Newt being a pot smoker doesn't offend me in the least. Bill Clinton lost a lot of respect from me with his "didn't inhale" ridiculousness. I pretty much assume, if you attend college in this country, that you've been exposed to pot--and if you're past your 20s, that you've had a few tokes no matter the education or background, because it's out there, and illegality or not, Americans grow some of the finest quality weed in the world.

What does offend me, and is illustrative of the inherent problem with Newt, is the pomposity and that inherent dickishness that Newt has on the issue.

"See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now it's illegal AND immoral. The law didn't change, only the morality. That's why you get to go to jail and I don't..."

That is pretty much, in a nutshell, the sum of Newt Gingrich. No matter what, HE is right, by dint of his doing something, and if anyone else does something, they are in the wrong. He is special, protected, and can do no wrong, because of his innate nobility.

This brand of exceptionalism is part of his appeal to some. That Americans are special by way of just being American. Newt is special and protected, because he is Newt. It is the retreat of someone who took perhaps one too many philosophy classes...

That is pretty much the issue. This fairly smart fellow, is convinced that he is above such petty issues of consistency of his own political philosophy, because the peasants can't possibly understand. Kids need a work ethic, so we're going to fire their parents and relatives, so that they can clean toilets to learn their place. Never mind the impact of firing staff and dumping those folks onto the jobless rolls. Never mind the shedding of jobs and the creation of an underclass, that doesn't need to be discussed, because Newt had an idea. Palestinians are an invented people, and treating with them on any issue is useless, since they are just Arabs, and in no way, shape, or form, should anyone take offense to this or you're a racist scumbag who doesn't understand geopolitics and if it comes around to bite him on the tochis, then it's only proof of the mongrel nature of these idiots who don't understand that Newt is an idea man. Pot is immoral now, because Newt isn't smoking it on a regular basis, and the Americans who do now, just don't understand how awesome it was to be a grad student in the 60s...

This peevishness and innate dickishness is the heart and soul of Newt on pretty much any issue. And do we really want a President who is just a dick?

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Romney Bites Off a Bit More Than He Can Chew...

2011-12-13T08:41:00.001-05:00

The last week has been interesting where issues of marriage equality are concerned. Between Rick Perry getting clowned on YouTube, the outing of one of the ad's authors, with Newt's own sister siding against him, with Newt upping the ante and supporting a Constitutional Amendment to ban marriage equality, and now Mitt Romney making a grievous error in judgement in thinking a vet would be supportive of his brand of bigotry.

The Primary fight seems to be gearing up, and the GOP's candidates seem to be realizing that economic issues are not their strong suit right now. Not with a House and Senate that are sitting on legislation and without much rudder save to say "President BAD!" so instead it looks as if the field wants to outdo one another on the issue of marriage equality.

Yes, I use marriage equality. Gay marriage is an odd term, since folks don't gay pump gas, get gay inheritance, or gay eat dinner. This apparently, sets me apart from a fair number of folks in the GOP's current field of candidates though.

Michelle Bachmann has asserted that homosexuals are currently free to marry anyone that they want, so long as it's someone they're not attracted to. There is some rumbling that it could be a bit closer to home for her than just a wedge issue, but illustrative of her own marriage, but that isn't really the issue here.

Rick Santorum is now infamous in his support of family values--or rather, supporting a vision of family values that only supports a some families.

Now, we have Newt and Romney gearing up to slap fight over the issue. On one hand, you have the former Governor of Massachusetts who fought against marriage equality--and lost--and Newt who wants to see a whole new breed of Constitutional Amendment precedent started by proposing one that would actually limit citizens' rights for the first time in our history.

Couple it with Glenn Beck's attacks on Newt, and Breitbart's backing away from GOProud, and you are witnessing the beginnings of an epic slap fest in the offing. Each candidate is trying to define themselves in such a way that they can maximize profits from a increasingly beleaguered electorate that has only so many dollars to donate to the fight. And worse, it is a fight that they are losing in the court of public opinion, as the aging demographic that fears marriage equality is growing smaller, while a youth fired electorate is becoming inspired.

Romney's stop in New Hampshire, and attempt to pander by choosing a vet to appeal to, and having it backfire shows a bit of problem. He's not alone in it, since Rick Perry managed to enable voting for his ad on YouTube to rocket himself to infamy. You have Fox News releasing a recent poll on air that showed that the President is far more popular than any of the GOP candidates that they offered, and now Romney hands a vet a proverbial weapon on camera, without knowing where the vet was going to shoot. He assumed that a vet would be an easy mark for pandering, and was schooled in knowing his audience, vetting folks before appearing with them, and missing the idea that he might just be on the wrong side of history.

The current GOP field has a somewhat storied relationship with the concept of marriage equality. My own favorite for the Primary, Buddy Roemer personally does not support it, but he is in support of states' rights to choose and supports states that assert that they will stand for such unions. Huntsman supports civil unions, but falls short on marriage equality. Johnson used to support civil unions, but now figures that the government has no business deciding who should be married. It is less than ideal.

It is less than ideal, and it is less than ideal, since few are willing to approach the hypocrisy of it.

Not in Rick Perry's willingness to employ homosexuals. Not Bachmann's own somewhat sad tale of a marriage based on lies. Not the support of a faith based on love and compassion, and twisted to support fear and hate. Those are all issues, but ultimately, we have to address the basic problems with Republican values of support of the Constitution and the concept of slicing off rights for citizens based on Biblical notions.

It violates the freedom of religion, first and foremost. Not all faiths, not all ministries, are against marriage equality. In Iowa alone over 175 ministries stepped forward to oppose a ban on gay marriage. By asserting that the dogma of some faith supersedes others, it violates the freedom of religion. That atheists are bound to this spiral against marriage equality, is even more a violation of the freedom of religion. Folks want to ban marriage to some within their own ministries, they should be allowed to do so, but when they assert that their dogma be accepted by all, we have exactly the sort of issue that the First Amendment was created for.

Equal access under the law and the right to privacy? Those are likewise issues that illustrate why this is the wrong issue for the GOP to support. We cannot claim to be the party of responsibility, when we abandon these principles.

And what is lacking now, are folks pointing this out to our candidates. Instead, they pander to radicals who see the nation engaged in some kind of holy war, and blind to the fact that their own Fundamentalism mirrors that of other nations, that they really don't like.

If anything, this push against classic Republicanism--and the lack of support of states' rights in an attempt to force a Constitutional Amendment to limit the rights of citizens--has to be opposed, and questions brought before the candidates, over and over again, on how they can reconcile their Republicanism with this facile veneer of "Social Conservatism" that is neither very social and certainly rooted in radicalism...

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

An interesting twist on hypocrisy...

2011-12-11T11:31:00.000-05:00

For a moment, let's set aside the hypocrisy in Rick Perry's recent YouTube blunder that was a fair insult to the gay community in an attempt to curry favor with the Religious Right on the issue of prayer in school, with using background music lifted from Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring. Or Perry's adoption of the fashionable jacket worn by Heath Ledger's character in Brokeback Mountain while we're at it.

Let's instead take a look at the outing by GOProud of one of the authors of the ad, Tony Fabrizio.

Andrew Breitbart recently resigned from the Advisory Board over this issue. For those who haven't followed this, GOProud's Executive Director Jimmy LaSalvia was outraged and tweeted excessively about Fabrizio's involvement in Perry's ad.

Breitbart issued a statement about LaSavlia's bitter rancor over Fabrizo's involvement with the ad, and the campaign.

"It is with sincere regret that I announce I must step down as a GOProud advisory member. On numerous occasions I have spoken with [GOProud leaders] Jimmy LaSalvia and Chris Barron of the significant impact the practice of “outing” had in my evolution from the political left to the right. I was under the absolute impression that both agreed. I have a zero tolerance attitude toward the intentional infliction of vocational and family harm by divulging the details of an individual’s sexual orientation as a weapon of political destruction. As an “Advisory Board member” I was not consulted on this extreme and punitive act. Clearly, there are more productive means to debate controversial ideas and settle conflicts. Therefore, I cannot in good conscience stand with GOProud. I still stand by gay conservatives who boldly and in the face of much criticism from many fronts fight for limited government, lower taxes, a strong national defense as well as the other core conservative principles."

It fails to hone in on the problem with the ad itself. With the conflation of gay personnel serving with distinction in our armed forces, and the assertion of the First Amendment right of freedom of religion in our schools, the demonization of homosexuals by some within the Republican Party, yet their inclusion at the highest circles, so long as they keep quiet, and the willingness to use and borrow from film, composers, and certainly the labor and support of groups like GOProud to serve their interests, while throwing the gay community under the bus when it suits.

I can understand Breitbart's nervousness with associating with folks who feel that outing is a valued practice. In part, it reinforces the idea that homosexuals should fear their positions if exposed. It takes away the intrinsic right to privacy for individuals to conduct their lives as they see fit. I can understand that, and in a way, I can applaud his effort to distance himself from folks who use a bitter tactic to punish those that they disagree with.

But it doesn't get to the heart of the matter.

Perry's campaign has included folks at its highest levels who are homosexuals. Pretty much, every campaign has, because at 10% of the population, folks is everywhere. That homosexuals are accepted in Congress, in offices, in jobs inside and outside the capital isn't really a question. It is simple fact. Congresscritters often hide their orientation, even from their spouses in an orgy of self loathing that often spills over in messy public fashion on occasion. It is a "dirty little secret" that really is only "dirty" to those whose favor they want to curry, while hiding behind a veneer of "family values"--a term that bothers me on several levels since apparently it is only THEIR families that are important, and no one else's. That Perry's ad was crafted and worked on by folks who are homosexual, who borrowed heavily from the homosexual community, and then used a grand conflation to strike fear in the hearts of the so-called "values voters" is itself a bit of hypocrisy, you then have a yellow journalist of Breitbart's standing, who reveled in Weiner's clothed weiner complaining about outing someone's relationship proclivities.

The sexual politics in the current field of GOP candidates is odd this time around. A hefty bit of hate for homosexuals within Bachmann's campaign, certainly with Santorum's. Perry now looks to rise to the fray to make a statement as well, but he's just fine with homosexuals serving with his campaign, just not out in the public, or rather, is fine trading on fear, while employing them, and using their insight. Let's not even forget the hypocrisy of supporting serial cheater Gingrinch, while screaming to high heavens about a Twitterpic of a Congressman who hadn't quite cheated yet.

The current GOP field is trying to make a lot of hay by demonizing the gay community. Bachmann. Santorum. Perry. Heck, Newt's lesbian sister is supporting Obama this time around already over her own brother. It is a fear within the candidates that they have to take a strong stand against something. Something that they feel ought to be feared. It is a calculated effort, and a terrible mistake on the part of the campaigns and their staff. They should be taking a stand for something. And that should be standing for equality of rights. It should be standing for compassion, unity, and inclusion. Already, within their own ranks, they have homosexuals in the highest halls. It's time that the leadership recognized them, openly. To bring the party openly into the new century, because they've done so behind closed doors for the last 50 years.

Breitbart's resignation is odd, because it fails to recognize the real issue. Not the outing, but that homophobia shouldn't be a watchword within the party. That it is hypocrisy of the highest order, but then again, asking Breitbart to recognize blatant hypocrisy might be a tall order in and of itself. It is, however, an excellent starting point to begin to discuss why the party has decided to bet so heavily on bigots, and then complain bitterly when the leadership is called upon it. Why the party has invested so heavily on hypocrisy on issues of "family values."

It is time that the GOP moves beyond bigots and those who cheer them. This election is an opportunity to move beyond that, and I fear that we will not see movement beyond, because people fear doing something truly momentous, and actually lead as opposed to follow the clutching and fearful masses.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Intellectual Fundamentalism Part Deux, Trey, what's that third one?

2011-12-10T09:02:00.000-05:00

Rick Santorum has fired yet another salvo into the Presidential race with his insistence that "science should get out of politics."

To say that Rick holds that politics should serve ideology as opposed to the public weal is nothing new. His own campaign for "family values" has earned him...let's just say a stain on his public persona. Rick is, after all, no stranger to the struggle to find definition...

The thing is, in his latest attempt to assert relevancy in this race, is that he illustrates a problem in the field of current GOP candidates. A willingness to side with intellectually stunted, yet ideologically "correct" folks. Climate change. Evolution. Crime statistics even. Part of this, is the result of the wedge issue of "Intelligent Design" that has allowed folks to take a window of belief and hold it as a "controversial issue of science" as opposed to "This is our belief and screw you scientists!" It allows folks who fear vaccines to hold up papers that aren't supported as a shield of belief, as opposed to good science. It allows discounted studies to be clutched to try to stave off the EPA, the FDA, or any decent thoughts of how to avoid catastrophic change in how we look at industry and the future of energy production in the nation.

Some of these issues are based in economics. Folks are invested in industries that are threatened by change and advances in technology and increasingly pointed studies that are showing systemic changes in weather patterns unlike anything in the previous hundreds of years. Some of these are based on a shifting of narrative to force discussion about religious indoctrination in our schools under the aegis of competitive theory. Some of it is just hysterical natterings and support of these idiots only muddies the waters and creates enough chaos to try to force the other two areas forward.

In part, we can blame the Fairness Doctrine. The idea that there were always two sides, equal but opposite has been built into media narrative for some time. With the fall of the Fairness Doctrine, we still have that structure built into how we approach news--save that without the Fairness Doctrine, there is no onus to provide anything looking like a true balance. Folks can advance anything as competing, and then nod sagely as folks spout rubbish, and appear to be "fair and balanced."

Part we can blame on the Neocon's favorite of subjective reality. So long as you believe it, it has to be so, in your world view. Twisted out of true, and promoted further, it allowed us to march on Iraq and pursue goals of questionable merit based on what amounts to belief that something has to be true, because I said so.

It is a sort of intellectual Fundamentalism that reduces thought away from fact, and into the realm of belief. It is a dangerous sort of thought process, especially when used to justify public policy on someone's "gut feelings." Be that a gut that tells them that climate change is impossible, despite mounds of evidence. Be that a gut that tells them couples loving one another and marrying in different churches and ministries or faiths defines their own marriages. Be that a gut that says, "aquifers are pussies." It boils down to folks who value narrative over facts. Who see science as a competitive force, because it keeps refuting claims of belief, as opposed to arguments based in fact.

Good public policy has to be rooted in fact. Good public policy isn't just rooted in ideology and belief of the greater good, but also rooted in practical solutions. Practicality demands that we base public policy in solid fact, and that we alter our course when conditions change. Be that tax policy, be that how we deal with other nations diplomatically, be that how we address energy policy, be that how we deal with crime. Instead, we have a rise of those who see belief as being equal to fact, and this sort of Intellectual Fundamentalism keep trying to shift narrative, as opposed to discussing facts. That they see science as an enemy only shows how poorly they can defend these policies. In a sane world, we would trounce them out of office, and laugh as they gnashed their teeth and pounded fists on podiums, but we are not in a sane place in our politics now, and if anything, we need to work to get back to a sane place where we can look at facts without trying to put up blinders of ideology to counteract them.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

QC

2011-12-09T08:29:00.000-05:00

I'm going to risk rehosting a pair of comics by J. Jacques. I'm going to do this so that I don't leech a tiny bit of bandwidth by hotlinking these comics from the man, because I do so out of mad love for one of my favorite cartoonists working today.

You will note I said cartoonists, and not "webcomic" as a qualifier. Because, it's true.

I start my day off with a few visits online to several webcomics. Sinfest.. Something Positive. Girls With Slingshots. PvP. I make forays to Penny-Arcade three times a week. Lovecraft is Missing once a week. I live in hopes that Dresden Codak will be updated on a regular basis, because it is brilliant, though spotty in its uploading.

But my favorite, and it's up there with Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows, is J. Jacques' Questionable Content.

Why?

Well, for one, I was a long time resident of Northampton. NoHo and QC are inextricably linked. QC skewers a lot of the wee hipsters who populate the berg, and that's always good for a laugh. Locations in QC are recognizable if you lived in town, and it's always nice to see the old girl represented, even if Jacques changes the names to protect the guilty. Then there's the simple fact that J. Jacques has grown as an artist by leaps and bounds. I don't mean just a little, but in a way that is stunning.

Frank Cho is one of my favorite cartoonists. He is just brilliant, and gifted in a way that not many guys are. His Liberty Meadows was just amazing. He no longer does the strip, and has moved on to doing full sized books, but if you get a chance, definitely check out his stuff. The thing is, Frank's stuff has always been stunning. His pinup art, his comic, his sketchpads are chock full of just brilliant work.

J. Jacques didn't start off stunning. QC started off as a sort of...well, let's be fair, it started off with this somewhat inauspicious strip.

It was funny. It was very much what you expected from a webcomic.

It has grown over the years. It is all growed up, and J. Jacques has blossomed as an artist, and this is QC today.

The art isn't necessarily the biggest draw. There are guys who can draw circles around our boy. The style suits QC though, and the biggest draw is that the characters have grown with the strip as well. Just when you think that he can't do another punch in the junk joke, he goes and puts in a strip that makes you wonder HOW did so much dust just blow up in the room. QC has a lot of heart. It is a comic that stands apart for me, in how invested you can get with sprites on the screen, and the journeys of these characters over the years has been full of tribulations, and always with ring of honesty for how people live. It is a comic, so yeah, there's a level of over the topness that goes for the punchline, but the emotion and the relationships are complex, full of flaws, full of joy, full of rage, and varying degrees of vexness that set it apart for me. Coupled with a location that I dearly love, and the fact that our boy is growing constantly, it is one of those special places on the web.

If you don't visit QC every morning, I invite you to do so. Go through the archives. It is a backlog of strips to go through, but it is a great journey, and I hope you get hooked, because it's one of those comics that is special, and it keeps on being great, and damned if I ain't proud of a local guy who has put his work out there, and done an amazing job of it.

Belated DA 2 review

2011-12-08T09:08:00.000-05:00

I was derailed yesterday from popping up a few words about DA2 yesterday. Damn you Jon Stewart, damn you to the Hell of Being Flayed Alive for bringing me ridiculosity so early to keep me from my appointed task.

I wanted to do a review of DA2, now after Skyrim has hit the shelves, because I thought that the early reports of DA2 were a little off base. Comparisons seem to keep popping up here and there, and that is sort of like comparing apples to mangos.

Dragon Age 2 is obviously the sequel to BioWare's swords and sorcery title, Dragon Age. The former was more than fair popular, with scads of downloadable content, an epic storyline, and much more blood than you could shake a stick at--which seemed to be a selling point in some mind at BioWare at one point. I can only imagine the meeting that idea took hold in.

"So, Bill, the blood? It seems kinda...excessive."

"Yeah. Buckets. And you can KEEP the blood on too! Just walk around drenched. It's for the kids."

Dragon Age was a gritty sort of fantasy, with Dark Spawn rising from the bowels of the earth, to consume the flesh of the living and put all they found to the sword. The Grey Wardens, sentinels and warriors charged to fight these creatures of darkness, are themselves tainted by the blood of their foes, giving them power and dominion to oppose such fell creatures. Betrayed, the Grey Wardens are nearly wiped out, not by their eternal foes, but by the political mechanizations of nobles who seek the throne. There is back biting, there is betrayal, there is blood, there are the usual BioWare mechanics of choosing your companions' paths, making decisions that affect the plot, the fate of those companions, and the fate of the world. The scope of DA was huge--the fate of the nation is in your hands, to help a king rise, to avenge your family's honor, to battle the Archdemon, and unite the lands.

Heady stuff. The first game had some issues. Maps were not just repetitive, but often exactly the same. The gameplay was somewhat repetitive as well. The animations were sometimes a bit wooden, and it shared some of the flaws of BioWare's titles of the time, in sort of odd gathering quests and the like. The story and characters, that pushed the title up though. Sweeping saga of the last Gray Warden, charged to refill the ranks of his order...

DA2 is not just a sequel, it's pretty much a different game entirely. Voice acting for your character takes a spotlight--and the dialog choices are ALL fairly satisfying. The combat is not a deep system, but looks pretty, and you can still turn the gore up, though it is less a factor of looking like your character walked in from the set of Carrie. The whole gameplay system has been revamped. Skills and abilities flow in trees that boost performance, but the choices are fairly limited. Progression to a godlike status is not fueled by some mystic ability imbued by the ingestion of the ichor of the Dark Spawn, but about the skill of the Champion of Kirkwall.

And that is maybe the real difference between the games. The scope is far different this time around. While the first game was an epic of the rise of the Grey Warden, DA2 is about a refugee from the war, who lands in Kirkwall, and scrambles to take care of his/her family. The linking scenes and structure set the entire game as a flashback, where one of your boon companions is held by the Chantry and interrogated. Varric tells your tale, your unofficial chronicler.

Structurally, the game was, to me, much more satisfying because of that. It wasn't an epic, it was a self contained tale. The rise of a merry band of heroes, looking not to save the kingdom, but get paid. At least at first. It is a more personal sort of tale. It was in many ways, a deeper look into the world, because you get to see it more up close. The Circle of Magi was featured in the first game, but more as a resource to call upon. In the second, you get to see the effect that religion of the Maker has on the mages. How it impacts the politics. You get to be involved in some of that dirty politicking as well. Where before, you shape the fate of a nation, you are a little closer to the fray in the second. Your actions impact, if anything, your character's actions have a sweeping impact. The return of Flemeth. The Qunari. Sparking a war. But at the heart of the game, it is not about setting these huge things into motion with any great plan, but rising out of consequences from smaller actions.

That, I thought, was the real strength of the game. While DA was epic and writ large, DA2 is a smaller scope. Your actions have impact, but those actions are spilled over from small ones. To save this soul. To save that one. To let someone go. To show mercy. To help a companion. Stay loyal to a friend, and it spills over later on. And to be fair, it's a game that doesn't make those decisions easy.

In BioWare games, you tend to have two choices. Be a goody two shoes, or be a right bastiche. The nobler path is almost always less profitable, but ends up with its own rewards in the overall arc. DA2 allowed you to be noble, fell, or just a smart ass. Yes, I chose smart ass fair often. The dialog for the smart ass options were far more entertaining. The thing is, you can lose companions if you chose the nobler path always. You build not a force of shining heroes, but friends and companions. Of any BioWare game, DA2 had some of the hardest choices to make in the quest to build up your merry band of troublemakers. Paragon or Renegade in the Mass Effect games is fairly easy. DA2 doesn't make those choices easy. In serving your companions loyally, can lead you to some fairly dark stuff. Even with the best of intentions, it can lead you to doing some very bad things. The consequences for doing the "right" thing aren't easy to wend through. There is no real righteous path. Which, for me, was the real draw for the game. The story unfolded, and you were at the heart of this conflict, and the consequences for seemingly small actions early in the game spun out later. Structurally, it was a better story than the first, for me. It wasn't epic, but set the hooks. It builds, but from tiny actions, you are at the heart of the chaos, and your best intentions can wind up impacting everything. For me, that was wildly satisfying.

Epic is fun. To have this grand sweep of armies, the fate of nations. DA2 wasn't that, but the consequences of these more personal tales, wind up igniting a war. It shows how the Law of Unintended Consequences can play out. It is a very different title than its predecessor, and that is not a bad thing. It is a game with a different scope, and that more closer look at the world, the people, the consequences, that was what I think the franchise really needed. I thought how the team structured the tale was clever, and the choices to be made, aren't simple and easy. That was refreshing. It wasn't that you were mired in blood and danger always, with huge import, but that you had choices to help a friend. To do things to support their own quests, often at odds with your own, and fraught with their own difficulties. Your companions are often at odds with one another as well, so balancing them all is a challenge. It is a more personal game, in its scope, and that was a lot more satisfying for me, than just building an engine of destruction to rain down fire upon my foes.

It has flaws. The maps are still an issue. The same ones, over and over again. Admittedly, this was less an issue for me, since you were visiting the same places over and over again. The DA team really needs to look at how the Mass Effect team builds their maps, because each location in Mass Effect, while often similar in flavor, is unique. The combat was sometimes laggy--RPGs aren't action titles, so that is forgivable. The inventory system was odd, in that you had a junk pile--items that had little intrinsic value and were not useful to the story, not useful to building much of anything, and yet, you put the little bastiches in your pack anyway. The crafting and equipment upgrades were very basic, though it was sort of nice to hear the chime of finding a new resource. There are certainly issues to work on, but for me, the story was key. The combat system could still be tweaked, but it was serviceable. It was a huge leap graphically, and the addition of voice acting was a boon for the franchise. It is a game that was a good sequel in my mind because it didn't try to recreate the same epic feel of the first. It expanded the view of the world, of the events shaping it. It was a huge leap for how the this world is revealed. Structurally, it was a more cinematic tale, with a strong feel for a beginning, middle and end. It played a bit with conventions in the genre, and it certainly played with characters, and they were fun. It wasn't a game of turning your character into an engine of unstoppable rage, and I kind of liked that.

DAMMIT!

2011-12-07T09:59:00.000-05:00

I was going to do a post in a somewhat belated review of Dragon Age 2--a game that I think has gotten a bad rap over the last few months. Not a perfect game to be sure, but with Skyrim out, and watching folks delve into it, there is rumblings of how terrible DA2 was, and in comparison the two games are apples and mangos.

That WAS until the Daily Show fired up on Hulu. And the mind numbing disingenuousness began to roll in.

The story was the War on Christmas. Lincoln Chafee fired ANOTHER shot across America's bow with his heathen "Tree Lighting Ceremony." Yes, friends and neighbors, Chafee refused to call it a "Christmas tree." REFUSED!

I also hear he eats the babies of the pure of heart in his spare time.

Now, let's set aside for a moment that we live in a nation with many faiths. Let's set aside for a moment the separation of Church and State--which coincidentally allows us to ignore the fines that the Puritans enacted when they landed upon our sweet and sunny shores for anyone who decorated for the holidays, or exchanged gifts on Christmas as they declared it a sacrilege. Let's set aside the issues of unity in this season within a nation of many faiths, peoples and creeds, and get to the heart of the matter for me.

The previous two term Republican Governor, Donald Carcieri did exactly the same thing.

Now then, when I see the Fox News logo, I understand that I am going to see some partisan jingoism. Just the same as when I see the Fox Entertainment logo, that I'm going probably hear a mildly veiled dick joke somewhere in the comedy stylings of Seth and the cats at Family Guy. What is at the heart though, is the level of retcon that has been going on as of late. Not just a failure to report, an odd silence that glosses over events that are inconvenient to narrative--which is how most news sources deal with said inconsistencies--but we have within Fox now a willingness to rewrite history.

The level of retcon as of late has been skyrocketing. Newt. Bachmann. Perry. Cain. With so many gaffes and so many errors of judgement, I can feel for the poor bastiches at Fox who have miles and miles of tape that refutes a lot of their own statements, out of their own mouths. What is sad, is that they seem to forget that in this age, NOTHING that is said on the air EVER goes away. There are enough folks who are squirrelly enough to research, to hold onto, and run down quotes. Plus, with everyone wanting to archive their footage so that they can generate page views sifting through the stuff, you can use their own vaults to mine for the refutation in their own words.

This goes for Romney. This goes for Newt. This goes for Paul. This goes for Obama. This goes for Weiner. This goes for Pelosi. The difference with the Democrats, is that they don't have a network cheerleading them, and actively going for the retcon, and calling it "opinion" to veil the inherent and built in inaccuracy of those inconvenient points to the narrative.

Narrative is part of the problem. When you dedicate a news agency to narrative, you are stripping out the journalism portion of the show. Journalists can certainly grind axes--and Fox has a tendency to lambast journalists who show favor for folks they don't agree with as being "partisan" but they are just telling it like it is, apparently. Journalism is about exposing those inconvenient truths. Not hiding them. The Fourth Estate exists as a counterbalance. When you have collusion between those in the state and the press, you have engines for repression and tyranny. Which is why we built in the freedom of the press right into the Constitution. What we see within Fox is an abdication of that freedom. A willingness to get in bed with the State and spin whatever folks want, the journalist version of mercs for hire, to write what folks need written, and damn the ethics, damn the consequences, they are getting paid!

The collusion and willing and even enthusiastic joining of the Justification Machine isn't new. Neocons have built a whole industry of writers willing to sling anything as fact, to justify policies in scholastic journals and in the book trade. That this Justification Machine bled into the media is by design, but gottverdammt this is an example of some bald faced shit.

And yes, it offends me. It offends me because I still consider myself fairly Conservative. The problem being, that the Justification Machine has moved the goal posts on what that means as well. What it means to be Republican even has shifted thanks to this, and the platform has shifted likewise. Strong markets, hewing to the Constitution, and responsibility are redefined by the moment. Such that, "religious freedom" is now under fire by the very folks who like to tout it. Responsibility in the markets is long gone. Fiscal Conservatism apparently now means "tax cuts" as opposed to efficient taxation and spending, and Social Conservatives can hate on their neighbors with a radical impunity. And all the while, we have a network that can champion an Astroturf movement that they created themselves, and laud as "patriots" while castigating students and veterans who turn out to illustrate the excesses of a skewed market system that doesn't resemble anything like free market capitalism in the least.

This latest incident only shows how far we are through the Looking Glass. Not just Newt being championed as an Elder Stateman, despite losing his office in shame nearly two decades ago. Not just "Family Values" is a catchphrase for "No family for you!" The willingness to simply edit history, even recent history, even events from a week ago, to not spin, but rewrite whole-cloth, and then claim the moral high ground on the strength of the lie, knowing that their target audience is not competent to judge, due to a lack of historical understanding, or basic research skills, is not just troubling, it is offensive, and twists anything looking like journalistic integrity out of true.

Yes, the bitter is flowing this fine morning, and I was looking forward to writing an ode to a game that I really liked...

Crossposted to the Motley Moose

The Good Stick

2011-12-06T15:49:00.000-05:00

I know, it's been awhile, but I wanted to return with something maybe a bit of a personal nature.

I just got back from the doctor's office. Nothing major, just a routine sort of blood test. Routine enough that I tend to not think about them too much. I mention it, because something not terrible happened. The phlebotomist stuck me, got my blood drawn in record time, and without much in the way of pain. For those of us who get stuck on a regular basis, that is an appreciable thing. (Diabetics, you know what I'm talking about)

I thanked the gal, on a good stick, and she was kind of surprised. Which got me to thinking.

For those who don't know, I had an aortic dissection some years back. My aorta blew like a bad seal, and that damn near killed me. Technically, it did, four times, but the Cardiac team at Bay State Medical is absolutely one of the best on the East Coast, and after 26 and a half hours of surgery, they got me sealed back up and on the road to recovery. Took a few months of healing, and I was back to work, and got on with my life.

When I was ambulatory, my girl and I went back to the ICU ward, and sent flowers to the cardiac team. Which, we discovered, was a surprise for them, which at the time, I thought was odd. These folks saved my life. For four hours, while the surgeon got a small break after doing 16 hours of surgery on me, they literally poured blood into me, which promptly leaked out, and they set themselves back up, and went back and did it again. For four hours. And for another 6 and half after that, they got me patched up some more. The pair who poured blood into me, the nurses in the ICU, and the surgeon and his team all got thank you cards, because, they saved my life. And my Grandma raised me to say "thank you" to folks when they deserve it.

To be fair, that near death experience has shaped me. I try not to take things too much for granted. It's way too easy to lose everything, and at random. The Universe is a fickle Mistress, and she WILL excise us from her at the blink of eye, and while there might be some regret at the loss, she's not going to look back if a gamma wash tears through our neck of the woods and scrubs life from this spiral arm. Nor will she be particularly perturbed if a rock falls from a ledge, a dam bursts, or a tiny clot forms in a blood vessel and bursts your aorta and tears away half the valve attached. Things will end, and whether or not you believe in an afterlife, there are things that I prefer not to face that question without having said. Thanks yous are at the top of that list.

It is sad that it often takes us something so severe to learn that particular lesson. To say the little things that matter. To appreciate when folks are doing well. We are all too inclined to grouse and complain, but noticing when folks do well, that is something that we often mean to do, but it is easy to pass off for later.

So, I say thank you. To waitresses who do a good job. To bartenders who treat me right. I've written notes to managers to tell them when their staff has done a bang up job, because noting the positive is something we tend to forget. Not noting excellence in a field. Not when folks go above and beyond, but when they do their job, and do it well enough, that we are made at ease, with a quiet competence. When it goes smooth enough, that we tend to not even notice the job was done, because it was that smooth.

There has been a lot said about when folks fail to do their jobs. We have a lot of folks decrying the state of education in this country. We have folks up in arms about failed regulation. We have folks who are fired up when unions fail their rank and file. When civil servants fail at their duties. When the media doesn't do their jobs, and lets questions go asked, let alone unanswered. And that is important. It is necessary even. While we have a duty to illuminate when things go wrong, it's important to note, when things go right. Not spectacularly well. Not when things are done that are mind blowing, but when folks extend us their excellence and courtesy as commonplace. Be they a teacher. Be they a nurse. Be they a phlebotomist. Be they a waitress. Be they a bartender. Be they a clerk. Be they a cop.

We exist in a culture that tends to bustle, and we weep and wail at the lack of civility and the breakdown of values and courtesy. This is a natural grouse. It is how we socialize and operate as a society. We identify examples of deviance, and we point them out. The problem is, we seem to be grousing a lot, as opposed to pointing out the deviance in the other direction. Society has carrots and sticks built in, and "please" and "thank you" are two of the most common of the former. And they need to be used more often. We want a more civil society, we need to use them more often. To reinforce those behaviors. Not just with our own children, not just with our friends, but with strangers and those who we may only see once in a lifetime. We need to illustrate that quiet excellence, that doesn't ask for recognition even. That's a step we need to take ourselves. Be that thanking that teacher who takes the time and effort with our kids. The bagger who packs our groceries with care and competence. To say thank you when it's deserved.

Maybe if we did that more often, we'd have less of the folks who we likewise need to scream at. Reward those who do well, and those around them are affected. Call it karma, call it paying it forward, call it loving kindness, call it good manners.

I'm ripping off the bandage from my stick, and it was a good one. It was good enough that it reminded me to be better to folks who do hard work, without expectation of thanks. We do this more often, all of us, to be mindful of that, we might not need to scream at the bad ones quite as often. Least that's how I'm going to interpret it tonight.

I know that I've been gone for a bit, but I hope that you've all been well, and I trust that you've been excellent to one another.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

John Kriesel took his stand...

2011-05-24T11:02:00.000-04:00

John Kriesel (R) took a stand in Minnesota. I applaud his efforts, as a Republican. As a human being. As a lawmaker. He did the right thing to stand against folks who would deny folks the right to marry and choose their own lives. He did the right thing. He stood against a tide that shames us all.

John gave for his country. He lost both of his legs serving this country. That he can physically stand now, despite his injuries shows a bit about his spirit and determination. That he stood against the Republican House in Minnesota shows it again. He served his country in Kosovo and again in Iraq, and now he serves us again by standing against blind bigotry. I don't care what your party affiliation is, I hope that you can see the courage that he displayed in standing for what this nation symbolizes.

If you truly believe that being gay is so terribly different that folks who are gay can't feel the same things that hetrosexuals feel for their partners, then, by all means, demand that your ministry deny homosexuals the right to marry within your church.

To demand that that ALL churches, ministries, and faiths do the same, then you have lost sight of the freedom of religion, and the freedom to choose your own path. You invite the government into your bedrooms, you invite all sorts of meddling. That is not a Republican value, it is not a Conservative value, and I, for one, would really like these radicals to GTFO of my damn party, because your blindness and short sightedness is a symptom of what ails this country. The need to meddle. The need interfere. The need to stick your nose in other folks' business.

Northampton has embraced gay marriage. It is a quiet little college town. The worst that has happened has been that gay couples can plan their weddings, buy their dresses and tuxes, and walk their dogs and get on with the business of living a life. Not a life that is drenched in sin, not a life that full of radicalism, but a normal life. Full of arguments, full of laughter, full of hopes, full of small tragedies, simply full of all the things that they watched their own parents go through.

Denying folks the right to marry makes them into a special class. It creates an inequality that drives folks to action, action that makes some folks uncomfortable.

Gay couples want only one thing: to be treated normally. To have the freedom to make the same dumb mistakes, to pick up their sweetie at the hospital, to share in the hopes and fears, and all the rest that goes with married life, that is sometimes grand, sometimes scary, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes amazing, sometimes terrifying, and at all times it is the dream to share a life. To be. Nothing more. Not different. Not strange. Just to be who they are, with someone who loves them.

Don't like them? You're not marrying them. I'm not a fan of the asshats who use their religion as a shield from knowledge, but I'm not going to deny them the same rights as everyone else. I don't care what folks do in the damn bedroom, and I don't assume that MY life is the model for others. Live your lives, folks. But stop demanding that everyone else follow your path.

This is a fundamental issue. It IS about being treated "special" and I would like to see us stop treating our brethren and sistren as something special. They are folks. No better. No worse. Equal treatment under the law. No special "commitment ceremony" because "separate but equal" has no place in this country.

I am a Republican. I do not stand for treating folks as special classes. I don't do not stand for imposing others' will on our bedrooms. I do not stand for invasion of privacy, and I do not stand for imposing others' religious views on our fellow citizens. If you can truly do these things, and try to call yourselves "Republicans" then you have no idea what the Republic actually stands for, and I would love it if you left the party, and not let it hit your fanny on the way out.

It is a disgrace. It is shameful. It is more than time to stand against this sort of disgrace to the nation and our people.

Crossposted to the Motley Moose.

A Crisis of Czars

2011-02-18T09:45:00.000-05:00

President George W. Bush speaks to the press after the signing of the 2008 Economic Report Monday Feb. 11, 2008, in the Oval Office. Joining President Bush are, from left, Chuck Blahous, Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; Pierce Scranton, Chief of Staff, Council of Economic Advisors; Eddie Lazear, Chairman, Council of Economic Advisors; Donald Marron, Senior Economic Advisor, Council of Economic Advisors; and Keith Hennessey, Assistant to the President for Economic Policy. White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

That, is a shot from the George Bush Archives.

I pop it up because of this wee gem on the House slate.

The House has decided to draw a line in the sand against experts who have experience and who keep the President informed and help formulate policy. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) has introduced the measure, "I think this sends a strong signal to the president that we are tired of him running this shadow government, where they have got these czars that are literally circumventing the accountability and scrutiny that goes with Senate confirmation." Likewise he states, "We are going to save millions of taxpayer dollars, but we are also going to send him a signal that he is going to have to hold his administration accountable to the same transparency that he promised, but has unfortunately failed to deliver."

What is interesting isn't the move to defund positions in the Cabinet--which is troubling enough, and is something that I'm not sure that the Representative has thought clearly through since the House and Senate change hands fair often, as do the folks in the Big Chair--but the lack of anything remotely looking like awareness that the term "czar" is a nickname that has been given to Advisors to the President, for a long while. Since Woodrow Wilson, who appointed Bernard Baruch to run the War Industries Board late in WWI. The nice folks at Wikipedia have compiled a list of "Czars" that have served since FDR.

The interesting take away from that list is that Bill Clinton appointed 8 such posts. George W Bush appointed 33. To be fair, President Obama has appointed 54. The uptick in these Advisors comes down to an expansion of issues that the Administration sees as important, such as climate change, the special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the Council on Environmental Quality; the senior adviser to the secretary of the treasury assigned to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry and senior counselor for manufacturing policy; the White House director of urban affairs; the special envoy to oversee the closure of Guantanamo Bay; the special master for TARP executive compensation at the Department of the Treasury; and the associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission.

AIDS apparently is still enough of a crisis to warrent a post, as it was during the Bush Presidency, though likewise to be fair, President Obama declined to continue with a Bird Flu Czar as under his predecessor. Likewise, copyright law is apparently important enough to warrent a post for both Administrations as well. Likewise, issues of regulation, budget, terrorism, and even faith based initiatives are fine. All of these, the President has continued posts from the previous Administration.

Where was the gnashing of teeth when the number of "Czars" grew to over four times that of the Clinton Presidency? The issue isn't about transparency--which the Administration actually has a "Czar" for, to advise on how to present things better--but rather, a focus on green energy, closing GITMO, diversity, and gutting economic policy to better the field for the coming Presidential election. While the Gentleman from Louisiana may talk a good game about belt tightening, it boils down to limiting the Presdient's effectiveness on issues that have potential to be disastrous for some interests who really don't like the idea of alternatives being found, or government efficiency to improve upon.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Apparently, Rummy didn't bone up on Nurnberg...

2011-02-16T10:24:00.000-05:00

Rumsfeld seeks to throw out the Padilla case. That is the lawsuit that claims that harsh interrogation tactics were used, and violated his civil and Constitutional rights. Padilla was the test case for the "enemy combatant" defense of holding even American citizens, and held without charge for four years, interrogated with methods that under most circumstances would be outlawed within the US. Particularly troubling in the case, was the stripping of rights due to the "unlawful combatant" nomenclature that was used to justify the holding without charge, which under most circumstances would have violated his civil and Constitutional rights.

The defense? Folks were only following orders.

Presidential immunity cited regarding 'enemy combatants'Any injuries suffered by Padilla were the result of President Bush’s authorization that he be treated as an enemy combatant, Rumsfeld’s lawyers say. The president enjoys complete immunity for those actions, they say, so the suit must be thrown out.

“Military detention is a normal and inevitable incident of an enemy combatant designation,” Rumsfeld’s lawyers argue in their brief. Padilla’s assignment to the Charleston brig was “routine and appropriate.”

Save, in this case, Rumsfeld did more than just follow orders. He crafted the programs and gave the orders himself. He was center to the legal framework of the justification of stripping the amenities of US citizenship and its rights and responsibilities from Padilla in his holding without charge. While Rumsfeld would like to throw the cloak of Presidential immunity over himself, he seems to forget that "Befehl ist Befehl" worked less well than folks had expected none too long ago.

Let's be clear. Padilla was pretty much guilty of conspiring to create a dirty bomb. The evidence was fairly damning, and his connections checked out. He was not a good man, and by and large, if he'd been more competent and law enforcement less on the ball, he might have actually gotten his wish and performed a horrendous act on our soil. The thing is, we have tried terrorists in this country before. Both foreign and domestic. ADX Florence holds several convicted terrorists, some more successful than Mr. Padilla. Mind you, not held, but convicted. Our justice system can handle trying even difficult cases, and the lawsuit that Rumsfeld is trying to deflect comes because folks wanted shortcuts and work arounds difficult points of law, as opposed to doing the job right the first time.

Ramzi Yousef-Captured in Pakistan, convicted for role in Bojinka plot in 1996, convicted for role in 1993 WTC bombing, sent to ADX Florence.

Wali Khan Amin Shah-Captured in Manila, convicted for role in Bojinka plot, sent to ADX Florence

Abdul Hakim Ali Hashim Murad - Captured in Manila, convicted for role in Bojinka plot, sent to ADX Florence

Eyad Ismoil - Captured in Amman, extradited to US, convicted of role in 1993 WTC bombing, sent to ADX Florence

Khalfan Khamis Mohamed-Captured in Cape Town, convicted of 1998 Embassy bombings, sent to ADX Florence

Mahmud Abouhalima-Captured in Egypt, convicted of 1993 WTC bombings, sent to ADX Florence
Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali-Convicted of 1998 Embassy bombings, sent to ADX Florence
Mohammed Odeh-Captured in Karachi, convicted of 1998 Embassy bombings, sent to ADX Florence
Mohammed A. Salameh-Convicted of involvement in 1993 WTC bombing, sent to ADX Florence
Mohammed Ali Hassan Al-Moayad-Captured in Germany, convicted of federal crimes related to funding Hamas, sent to ADX Florence

All convicted of Federal crimes. All captured and convicted. The difficulty being, that Rumsfeld and the Bush Presidency did not want to rely on law enforcement to do their job. They instead wanted the blunt force operation of the military to make things "easier" for capture. The problem being, while the military is fantastic at some operations, preserving a chain of evidence is not a particular strong suit. The matter of capturing and convicting terrorists comes down to a matter of law enforcement, and there come certain restrictions that the military does not have. Which is why it seemed the attractive option. The problem being, that if you simply want to kill terrorists, then the military is your tool. If you want to try and convict terrorists, it's another thing entirely. The Bush Presidency, and its staff were of two minds on the matter, wanting to have victories in court, as well as victories on the ground. Rather than play by the rules, they looked for workarounds on the law, and for shortcuts. The problem being, if you want to convict folks, then you really can't take those shortcuts.

The issue at hand isn't that Padilla wasn't a bad man. He was. But, we extend human rights and our system of justice to everyone, and in looking to work around these restrictions, Rumsfeld and his team were personally knowledgeable of their actions, and were cognizant of the legal ramifications enough that they ordered the Justice Department to produce legal memos to justify the actions that were taken. Not to look at precedence and work from a solid legal position, but to lattice a framework to justify actions already taken. Under orders or not, Rumsfeld and others named in this case, were fully aware of the shakey legal ground, and I hope to the 10,000 Hells that this case goes all the way, because we need to draw a line in the sand against those who use "orders" to throw away our basic values and foundations of our law. That this asinine legal morass threatens to throw out many cases only compounds the sin, because if we'd handled the mess with attention to detail, and according to law, instead of looking to shoehorn law and justifications for things already done, we would have many more names in ADX Florence, held without being martyrs to a cause, and held with justice being on our side.

In order to take the moral high ground, we must actually occupy that territory first, and damned if this case needs to be taken through, because this mess has sullied our name, our nation, and our system. It threatens us as much as the dirty bomb that Padilla hoped to build, and just as corrosive and dangerous to our systems of governance.

Crossposted to The MotleyMoose...

Tucker and Dale vs Evil

2011-02-15T09:22:00.000-05:00

Tucker and Dale vs Evil hit the film festival circuit early last year, and is now on video.

I try to stay away from hype on a film. I certainly stay away from those pesky awards, but on this one, I can see why it took SXSW Audience Award, as well a couple of other festival awards, because this is a little film with a lot of hearts. On screen, usually getting impaled with something sharp, wooden, and with a fair amount of Karo-based faux-blood product.

Our tale begins with a pack of college kids heading out into the woods for a weekend of fun at the lake. Enter Tucker and Dale, a couple of back woods boys who are likewise heading to the lake and Tucker's new vacation home, a charming fixer upper cabin in West Virginia. Which happens to be across said lake from the camping spot of our erstwhile college kids, out for a good time.

Without wanting to spoil things too much, let us say that hijinks ensue when Tucker and Dale are mistaken by the pack of college ne'erdowells as backwoods hillbilly psychopaths, and their quiet weekend of fixing up the cabin takes several turns for the worse as wave after wave of frat boys and girls extinguish themselves in appropriately spectacular fashions trying to escape the hapless fellas, just out to drink beer, fish, and clean out their new vacation home.

I would like to say that there was a deeper story, but that would be a lie. It is a film that likes the characters, likes to play with conventions--the earnest Tucker and Dale holding off a horde of college kids who seem hellbent to kill themselves in front of the boys, the beautiful lass left for dead by her friends, and saved by the kindly Dale--it treats Tucker and Dale with respect, while the cartoonish college kids are fodder for effects mill, as is the wont of slasher films galore. What it is, is funny and entertaining, and I love its tagline: The perfect love story...with a high body count puts well the entire film into a tasty tidbit.

Scary? Not so much. Cartoonish violence, a thin story, it is a great send up for slasher movies, and plays with the conventions that we all know, all hold dear, and shows you exactly how it's going to tip them over, and holds you accountable for how you take that. Eli Craig, who wrote and directed the film, isn't taking you through any new country, but that's half the fun. You know the conventions, you know the premise, and it's still a funny and fresh film. In part, because of the charm of Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine, and that of Katrina Bowden, who plays the damsel in peril, saved by our hillbilly heroes from a terrible death by drowning. The performances, and goofiness play off the script, intentionally thin and a foil for the conventions of the slasher, and the one thing that the film does, is keep its tongue firmly in cheek and with great affection to the source material and the genre.

If you missed it on the circuit, you can catch it on Netflix or at your video store. It is one of those gems that comes up on occasion that make movie watching fun. That is, if you find campy horror with grisly ends fun...

10 Myths About Buddhism

2011-02-13T15:15:00.000-05:00

Greta Christina at AlterNet got me thinking a bit with her piece on 10 Myths and Truths About Atheism. As a Buddhist, I sometimes get to field the odd question and assumption, and some of them are sometimes a bit off base. I don't pretend to be a historian, but I wanted to tackle the subject as an exercise in understanding.

1: Buddhism is a Pagan religion.
There are a lot of gods in many Buddhist practices. In part, because Buddhism doesn't replace native beliefs where it finds itself. Siddhartha is a revered figure, but the Buddha is the Enlightened one, and while revered, he considered himself a teacher, and encouraged those who set upon the Eightfold Path to reject anyone's infallibility, including his own. One of the features of Buddhism, is that it need not take the place of native beliefs, it is a philosophy that seeks to place itself in context with where it finds root. Gods have a place in Buddhist teachings, in a dualistic fashion. If anything, gods have a place as guideposts, and even as warning signs.

Gods tend to have specific purposes and duties. They are often locked into those roles. While revered figures, they are likewise unable to break from those roles. Gods, despite their divinity, are unable to become truly Enlightened, and in some ways, locked into those roles, by their own conception, they are to be pitied. They are locked into their roles in Celestial order. Protectors perhaps, guides perhaps, but ultimately as locked into the cycles of death and rebirth as anyone else, albeit, with different roles to play. It is in those roles that they are locked, and unable to break free of those roles, they are figures that can be revered, but ultimately, they are forces to respect, that are lessons in the dangers of acceptance of the cycles of suffering and rebirth.

2: All Buddhists believe in reincarnation.
While many sects place an emphasis on the cycle of birth and rebirth, that is hardly representative of all Buddhists. Shin Buddhists tend to concentrate on the now, as opposed to the next existence. Buddhism has had 2500 years or so of development and divergence in practice. Look at the profusion of ministries of Christianity, and add half a millennium of teachings, and you have an idea of how disparate the many schools of Buddhist thought can be. Reincarnation is an important part of many teachings, but that is likewise in context to actions that are preformed now. What Buddhists do all share is the universal truth of impermanence and the interconnectedness of all beings. As you awaken to that truth, so can we exercise our awareness and compassion. Compassion in the realization that no being is higher or lower, but the same and interconnected with ourselves. Reincarnation doesn't affect that basic connectedness.

3: All Buddhists are vegetarians.
While many monks maintain a vegetarian diet, anyone who has known a Tibetan Buddhist can tell you, that while vegetarian diet is revered, it also isn't always possible. Theravada teachings highlight that the Buddha accepted any food offered as alms, including meat. The prohibition against meat comes from actively seeking animals to be slaughtered for your consumption. It also comes from the concept of Right livlihood--to not engage in trades or occupations which, directly or indirectly, result in the harm of other living beings. The business of weapons, trafficking of human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison are all considered to be harmful. Mahayana practice is much more strict on the point--in some cases, depending on the Sutras taught, some reject the idea that the Buddha ate meat or permitted it. Some attribute that to the rise of Chinese monasteries--such institutions meant food prepared specifically for consumption of the monks, and that would mean that animals would be brought in specifically for slaughter. The Vajrayana traditions sometimes allow followers to consume alcohol and meat, and the Ganachakra prescribe both. While the Dalai Lama himself promotes a vegetarian diet, he himself partakes meat when offered. The Japanese schools likewise have de-emphasized vegetarianism as well.

4: Buddhists are pessimists with all that suffering.
The Four Nobles Truths can be interpreted by many to be dang pessimistic.

1: Life mans suffering
2: The origin of suffering is attachment.
3: The cessation of suffering is attainable.
4: There is a path to the cessation of suffering.

You will note, that "suffering" is in all four of those things. That, on the surface, seems to be a LOT of emphasis on suffering and pain.

Yet, in that, we have a path from that. The First Noble Truth is that we all suffer. Pain is an inevitable part of life. Pain, sickness, heartache, frustration, disappointment. While we seek to supplant that pain--and all living things do that--those remedies for pain are impermanent in nature. Be that sex, be that relationships, be that drugs, be that eating, be that satisfaction in our trade, all those moments of pleasure are transient.

The Second Noble Truth refers to our attachment to these impermanent things as a remedy for pain. Often that very search leads to more pain, with craving and clinging to these impermanent things, whose loss is inevitable, including our attachment to the illusion of the self. One of my teachers explained it simply: expectation leads to disappointment. Our attachments and expectations can lead us down a path to pain.

The Third Noble Truth is where things get away from the heaviness of suffering. There is hope to unshackle yourself from cycles of pain and suffering, some of your own making, some of the general nature of existence. By unmaking those attachments, and reliance on the transient and impermanent, we can overcome thhe causes of suffering. Free of worries and cares, we can detach from the impermanent.

The Fourth Noble Truth lays down the path to the end of suffering, between the extremes of hedonism and self mortification, we can free ourselves from those cycles of suffering. It takes work, it takes dedication, it takes practice, but we are ultimately responsible for our own path, and we can choose to do that. In the end, our path is our choice. It's a very empowering sort of statement, and one that is sometimes equally scary and hopeful at the same time.

5: Buddhists are all pacifists.
Yes, Buddhism holds a deep regard for all life. Murder, violence, war, all things to be rejected. Yet, Buddhists have fought in many conflicts over the centuries. In 621 CE, the monks of Shaolin fought to help establish the Tang Dynasty. Tibetan Buddhists formed strategies with the Mongols to assist in their victories. Zen Buddhists in Japan colluded with the samurai culture to dominate the nation. and was certainly involved in the rise of militarism in the 1930s to the rise of the Japanese prior to WWII, not just excusing the killing, but raising funds for manufacture of weapons and tools of war.

Dhammananda wrote: Buddhists should not be the aggressors even in protecting their religion or anything else. They must try their best to avoid any kind of violent act. Sometimes they may be forced to go to war by others who do not respect the concept of the brotherhood of humans as taught by the Buddha. They may be called upon to defend their country from external aggression, and as long as they have not renounced the worldly life, they are duty-bound to join the the struggle for peace and freedom. Under these circumstances, they cannot be blamed for becoming soldiers or being involved in defence. However, if everyone were to follow the advice of the Buddha, there would be no reason for war to take place in this world. It is the duty of every cultured person to find all possible ways and means to settle disputes in a peaceful manner, without declaring war to kill his or her fellow human beings.

There is the story of bandits killed by rinpoche who realized the intent to pirate and slay others, who were killed to prevent not just to protect those under his charge, but to prevent the pirate from going on to bring torment to others and his own self for those acts.

While the teachings of Buddhism hold deep regard for life, out of compassion for all things, it is like any other religion, and there are those who have used its teachings to justify a lot of things over the years, including war and violence. Ultimately, that decision has more to do with those who choose to do so. As a bouncer, I justified my actions in putting folks down hard to protecting folks from harm. It was my decision, and it's still a struggle. In preventing harm, and keeping others from harming others, I feel that I did right not only by my patrons, but by those who would harm them. In stopping things before they could get ugly, or uglier, I served a greater purpose. Justification and self delusion? Possibly, and that is the struggle to walk the Middle Path. While many Buddhists hold that violence is never an option, there are those who hold that their actions can prevent greater harm.

6: Buddhists are above sex and scandals.
Right.

Buddhist monks and nuns have been involved in all sorts of scandals and escapades, pretty much since the beginning of monastic practice. While the concepts of "Do not engage in sexual misconduct" is strong in teaching and practice, there have historically been LOTS of folks who tossed that right out the window. Even the concept of Buddhist monks being forbidden to marry is hardly universal--Pure Land Buddhist in particular in Japan--as the founder of the Jodo Shinshu school married, and authorized priests to marry as well. Celibacy in the monastic orders is hardly universal.

In modern times, across China, Japan, Tibet, Thailand, and even in America, Buddhists have been involved in scandals involving sex. People are people, and people often do dumb things. Buddhists are no different in that. There have been monks who have abused nuns in monastaries. There have been monks who have abused lay people--men and women. Charges of gross misogyny can be leveled against many temples and priests, not just in Asia, and not just in ancient history. The recent revelation of Eido Shimano's misconduct with students is hardly the first such scandal. Monasteries in China and Japan both have been guilty of prostituting nuns, and covered up, or excused. The lack of response by those in a leadership role in those monasteries is just as damning as the lack of response and dodging of the Vatican in response to charges of sexual misconduct by their own priests. Much as folks like to brush these things under the rug, they have occurred, and it is something that is still a danger. Buddhists are far from perfect, and the idea that Buddhists are above such things by dint of the nature of the practice and teachings is dangerous. Dangerous to the folks who leave themselves open to coercion, dangerous to the practices and temples where such things occur, and dangerous to those who want to ignore such misconduct. That thinking involves giving credence to an illusion that Buddhism is above such things, and illusions are something that Buddhists try to strip away from themselves. As in any practice or teaching situation, there are those who will try to use their position for personal gain, and for personal gratification. Even those who cloak themselves in respectability as teachers and priests. Buddhists are not above such things, and shedding light on these scandals brings the antiseptic of truth to ugliness that some would prefer be swept under the rug.

7: Buddhist are serious and can't enjoy life.
Hotei sort of dispels that. Hotei is the chubby, laughing monk that is popularized with lots of statues that are often mislabeled as The Laughing Buddha. Hotei was a monk from the ninth century in China, from the Chen school--the precursor to Zen--and has been venerated and commemorated as a popular figure of the zest that Buddhists can have for life.

While Buddhist practice does discourage extremes, one of the enduring facets is the humor of nearly all my teachers over the years. The Buddha himself was often depicted as smiling and and cheerful. Open heart and kindness are virtues to be celebrated in nearly every culture, and Buddhism is no different. Humor is a great tool, for pricking self delusion, and exhibiting compassion. Buddhists can drone on and on, but the greatest of teachers keep a zest for life, and instilling calm and comfort to those around them. Laughter and joy are to be shared, and its importance can be found in the Patisambhidamagga:

Those who are filled with smiles and laughter will perfect the virtues. That is smiling wisdom. Those who are filled with smiles and laughter will attain the path and the direct knowledges, and they will quickly realize the ultimate meaning, Nirvana.

Compassion, as a virtue, means to feel the pain of others. To realize that we are all connected and one. That leads not just to wanting to alleviate their pain, but liking others. Understanding others. Seeking to increase their happiness and welfare. Laughter and sharing it is one great way to do so. Yes, Buddhists can natter on about suffering and responsibility and duties, but at heart, you learn to like people more. Like yourself, like others, and that spills out in lots of ways beyond giving alms to the poor.

8: Buddhists don't believe anything truly exists.
Maya, illusion, is an important concept in Buddhist thought. We cling to many illusions, build entire scaffolds of reason to defend many illusions, and there are many schools of thought to the underlying nature of reality. Perception of reality are based on preconceptions and many of the tools that Buddhist bring to contemplation are designed to strip our preconceptions away.

I like how the Dalai Lama puts the answer to the question of Do Objects Exist?

"Analysis does not contradict the mere existence of the object. Phenomena do indeed exist, but not in the way we think.

The underpinnings of reality are a debate within oneself, on understanding the nature of conventional truth, and ultimate truth. It's a conversation that involves your own understanding, and is part of the journey we take to understand ourselves, our place in things, and how we relate to that place. In the end, that's something we need to look at, and reason out ourselves.

9: Buddhist teachers and priests are final arbiters of what is right.
While teachers and many figures have arisen to help show folks the way, the Buddha himself had a simple thought on this.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Ultimately, every Buddhist is the arbiter of their own path. While others can show you what has worked for them, and understand the hurdles that confront you, it is up to you to make your own leaps, and your own path. Teachers can help, priests can give you tools that have worked for them, and others, but in the end, it is up to you to figure out how to use them best. Teachers are resources, respected, but in the end, you have to make that journey on your own. You are the final arbiter in your path, and what works for you, may not work for everyone else, or visa versa. You are the final arbiter of what is right, and you have that responsibility to forge that on your own.

10: Karma is the cosmic balancing force.
Karma's root in Sanskrit is simple. Action. Karma as a concept is often misinterpreted as a way for the Universe to balance good and evil. You earn good karma or bad karma. That is an interpretation that has led to a lot of justifications over the years. In India and China, it is used as a justification to not help those who are less fortunate, because of the belief that their actions in a previous life got them to their current straits, and it would be meddling with the Wheel's purpose to assist them. That the Universe doles out suffering and pain in this life to correct your past mistakes. That bad things happen to you because of past misdeeds.

Karma is simpler than that. Karma is simply action. Cause and effect. Actions have reactions. All our actions ripple out with reactions, and those reactions ripple out further. You own your actions. You are responsible for them. You are responsible for your intentions and motivations as well. The Golden Rule to not do things that you wouldn't want done to yourself is hardly a concept that is specific to Buddhism. Every mainstream religion teaches that your actions have consequences. They differ sometimes on how those actions can reverberate, but in Buddhism, karma is an often misunderstood concept of cosmic balancing.

While many get caught up in the "good" and "bad" concepts of karma, ultimately karma is a simple concept. You are responsible for your actions. You should understand how your actions will impact others. Your own motivations for those actions are important. Saving a woman from drowning can be seen by many as a good act, but if you did it so you could grope her, less so good on you. Ultimately, karma is simply a concept that your actions have weight and consequence, and if you are responsible, you will bring awareness to your actions, and be aware of your motivations. Whether or not those are for good or ill, that is dependent on you. How those actions affect others, that is something to consider. Not just because you want only good things for yourself, but for others as well. Karma can get all knotted up with interpretations on their impact on your path, but it is less about how it will affect your next life, than how it affects others, now. Actions that help others radiate out. Good will shown can help others find compassion. Saving a man who is starving helps them now, and can help him realize that he can help others later. Harming others now, or simply annoying the crap out of them in traffic ripples out as well.

While there is a huge amount of teaching on the concept of karma and reincarnation, those teachings pale to the very simple concept that your actions have consequence, and being mindful of your actions, and motivations is important now, and to others. Those discussions are important for many, but getting lost in them can detract from simple practice of mindfulness and responsibility. Actions are important. Actions have consequence. Be mindful of them, and the rest is a lot easier to sift through.

Cross posted to The Motley Moose

A Forgotten Classic

2011-02-12T22:43:00.000-05:00

I am a big old geek.

I am looking forward to the release of Killzone 3. It is shaping up to be one THE shooters for the year. A combination of what looks to be crazy multiplayer action, and a story mode that is gritty and immersive.

Killzone 2 hit a while back, and folks hopped on it pretty well, and the Beta dropped for Killzone 3, and it has been a hugely popular. I've been surprised though at the number of folks who missed the original on the PS2 seven years ago.

Guerilla Games produced a game that I played the crap out of. Halo and Halo 2 took a lot of the attention away from this game, when this dropped in 2004, I scooped it up for my shiny PS2, and I took to it far more than Halo. In part, the story appealed more. The characters of Templar and Rico, Lugar and Hakha actually gave you multiple points of view--and a variety of game play styles to run through your missions with. The voice acting was fantastic. The variety of environments ran from trenches, jungle, arctic ice, swamp, to beat down urban tangles. Halo was just a hair too clean a future, and it wasn't until much later did I pick up either of Bungie's titles.

In part, the design ethic got me. It was a future that was lived in. It looked useful. Well, except for the Helghast's glowing red goggles which made them easier to spot. The weapons had a certain weight to them, they each had a different feel. Different purposes. The ISA's main battle rifle with its grenade launcher was handy for some situations. The Helghan battle rifle wasn't as accurate, but it chewed things up, and the secondary shotgun fire was just mean up close. The vehicles had a certain design ethic that was internally consistent. It was a future that looked organic and right. From the industrial areas to the makeshift camps. The heavily armored Helghast soaked up bullets and kept coming. The control centers and urban environments were beat on. Barrels on your turrets and big guns overheated if you pushed them. There was a balance in the limitations that seemed realistic.

The characters sucked me in as well. Captain Templar as an officer with a task, Luger who finds him on his delivery of an agent to hand over to the ISA, Rico, a gunner with attitude galore, and the In Field Agent Hakha. The relationships developed as time went on. The plot peeled back mission by mission, and while not incredibly deep, it was not overly complicated. You never got the feel that the writers were just piling on plot to yank the rug out from under you with a Clever Surprise. It was a war tale, and it marched along at its own pace, and the grit and immersion helped that. You reloaded, you looked at the weapon. You got tired if you ran too long. There was smoke and mist that obscured your vision.

It wasn't without problems. The game could glitch. The AI was sometimes less than brilliant. The controls took some time to get used to. For amazingly athletic soldiers, you couldn't jump over things save in preprogrammed areas. There was no real cover mechanic, so you wound up squatting next to things, and that had to do.

But despite these things, I found it to be a huge amount of fun. The controls, when you mastered them, were immensely satisfying. The environments were varied, and mastering them had their own rewards too. Mastering the characters was likewise entertaining--and the missions changed a bit for tactics depending on who you controlled.

Killzone 2 revamped the system entirely. Lean and peek cover. Vehicles. Simple objectives to plant charges, and a relatively long campaign mission. Less variety in environments, but a lot of house to house and tunnel to tunnel combat made up for some of that in being equally gritty. The design ethic of usefulness continued. Less variety perhaps, but environments that could be used with differing tactics. In many ways, it looks as if Killzone 3 is going to be an extension of the gains that Killzone 2 made, but no matter how pretty, and graphic and gritty the new one is, I retain an affection for the first. Not a perfect game, but like its design ethic, it was useful. And a lot of fun.

Folks are having a lot of fun with the brutal combat and the convoluted environments in the newest game in the series, but for me, it's nice to see the seeds from the first game finally seeing their ultimate fruition. If anything, it appears that Killzone 3 is making good on the promises and the continuing evolution from the first.

If you haven't played the first, there are copies available on Amazon and other vendors. It is priced fair cheap, and for those who fell in love with the second, and those who are fans of the third's preview copy, it might be worth a peek, just to see how far things have come, and where the seeds were lain for such a great design ethic.

Dreams

2011-02-11T13:17:00.000-05:00

Dreams allow us to possess what we cannot have while awake. That's one way to look at our nocturnal wanderings through the unconscious. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes gratifying, sometimes disturbing, sometimes nonsensical, they are how our big old brains sift through the day and what is really eating at us.

We tend to lie to ourselves fair often about our motivations. Our hopes, our goals, we can gloss over a lot in a fit of self deception. While most folks talk of dreams as aspirations, as our goals working out to become reality, in a fine language of hope, and metaphysical lashings to build up dreams as something greater, I tend to take a more...practical approach.

Perhaps it's the psychology that I had to take in teacher's training. Perhaps it's just a sceptical mindset. Perhaps I'm just a cranky bastiche. Been thinking about dreams for a bit--the travels between Colorado to New Mexico, and now back to Maine, and soon to Massachusetts are all in flux. Life in flux, dreams are in flux too. Nightmares and those delicious ones where you have everything you've wanted, to the odd and sometimes disturbing ramblings, they all have sort of congealed over these last few months of tumult. Dreams of my daughter. Dreams of losing my daughter. Dreams that have continued over the years in a weird episodic fashion that pick up just where the last one left off, like some unconscious soap opera that just gets stranger each time it picks up the old thread. Dreams of fights that go horribly, horribly, horribly awry. Dreams of being impotent against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Dreams of holding someone who is far, far, far away, and whose scent remains in my hindbrain and the thought of it can cause me to stop everything I'm doing when I remember it, and the feel her skin beneath my fingers comes unbidden. It's hard to lie to yourself in a dream. Your unconscious tends to cut out all the silly crap and sterling justifications, and pare you down to what you're really feeling. You may say that you don't have feelings for X, but your dreams will slice that particular lie right out. You can possess all the things you want, you hope for in a dream, and that is as telling as the dreams where you lose what is most important to you as well.

Big dreams, little dreams, the random firing of neuron dreams that have us do nonsensical things that TOTALLY make sense while asleep, they are a way of looking at your waking life that condenses down things that you might not have thought of as important, but resonated somehow. Not always earth shattering. Not always a window to the deepest workings of our psyche, we can over interpret dreams--as much as you can over-interpret Tarot cards.

I liken dreams to Tarot in a way.

A lot of folks use Tarot as a tool of divination. My own sceptical self doesn't really let me think that you can predict the future with cards. While I remain a bit of theist, I still have a healthy dose of scepticism that doesn't believe that the Universe tends to conduit itself through laminate cards made in some factory that also makes Aura Reading guides. Newage rhymes with sewage for a reason in my book, and that is perhaps a personal failing and prejudice, but I acknowledge that it's there. That being said, I think that divination tools like Tarot are useful. Tarot and other tools are means for meditation and examination.

Our brains are wonderful for attaching meaning to things. Images to emotion, people to emotion and chemical triggers, events to emotion. We bond our memories in all sorts of fashions, and our brains make connections between these concepts and emotions, and triggers all the time. We attach significance to events and people and places all the time, shifting relationships and meanings all the time. That's what has made us successful as a species. We can attach meaning to concepts with alacrity. We make webs of connection with those concepts with wild abandon. Which is why Tarot is a useful tool. Not to divine the future, but for self examination. The cards have meaning. They each represent a concept, and their position has particular significance as well. When laid out, you can use them to judge what meanings you immediately attach to the cards. In an honest reading, you can see what you attach as signficance as a means to evaluate yourself and your motivations. What in your past attaches most to the concept to this card? What attaches itself most readily to this one? What about that one? Used as a meditation, it can allow you to less worry about your future, but have a powerful snapshot of your current motivations and interior dialogue.

Dreams are another snapshot. For all the high flown language of dreams, and reaching for the sky, dreams are a good way to see first hand what the brain is sifting through. What attachments are most in the fore. What scares us most right now? What makes us happiest right now? What weird crap has managed to sift forward from the last few days in our lives, and impress itself on our psyche. Good dreams, bad dreams, they are snapshots of what the heck is really running through our brains.

We are justification machines. We attach meaning to things, and often we seek justifications and attachments when none are needed or wanted. We are big chemical soups that look for attachments and meanings all the time. We predict behaviors from those attachments. We react to things based on those attachments and meanings. Which is why things like panic attacks are such buggers. Chemical trigger goes off, and we don't know why, so we find reasons for why we are suddenly terrified. We can deceive ourselves by putting on layers of justifications for why do this or that, especially while awake. It's OK to speed because of this. You're not being untrue if you call a friend, right? It's just one more cookie. We find reasons for this, and we tend to gloss over our motivations, because sometimes the truth behind those motivations is scary stuff.

Dreams don't care about that, though. They cut straight down through the web of self deception, and what you've got going on inside, wells up. What is truly important, that gets all fuxxored up with all sorts of other things, and it's often hard to see those things when you have to sift through a mixed up dream narrative--and often that narrative is just random crap bound together by our brains constantly seeking to make connections--but in the end, good dreams or bad, they're an opportunity to take stock, honest stock, of what's actually going on behind our skulls.

In that, I tend to look at dreams as exactly that: opportunity. Good dreams show us the things that we hold important. Bad dreams as well too. While terrifying, they show what is important. What we may have been decieving ourselves about while awake. What connections are important. Our own guilt, our own fears, those are important things to know, what things are rolling around under the surface, and what we can work through.

I tend to dismiss the idea that the Universe speaks to us in dreams. WE speak to ourselves in dreams. We are honest with ourselves in dreams, and if we're smart, we listen to that, and try to not let ourselves be deluded by the layers of justification that we tend to slather on to make ourselves feel better. Rather than look to the mysticism of dreams as a conduit of the Universe, those dream books ARE useful tools for self evaluation. While you can lose yourself in running down what symbols mean in dreams, it is perhaps more useful to examine our dreams with a detached honesty. What drives us, what scares us, what brings us joy, we work all that out in dreams, and hopefully, we're open to not decieving ourselves that X, Y, or Z mean more than they do. We can confront the things that we tend to bury while awake. Good and bad. Love and hate, and all the odd emotions and attachments we make.

A good friend has been having bad dreams as of late. And for good reason, since there's a lot going on her life, and she's got fears a plenty, and heartache, and guilt, and more. I point to those bad dreams as opportunity. Not only for exposing what's going on, but to allow herself to confront her feelings of guilt that she has no reason to feel guilt from. Takes on too much onto herself, and while it is an intellectual exercise to say, "yeah, that's on someone else's shoulders" the dreams tell a different story, that there's more work to be done on that front. For her, I say that even those bad dreams are opportunities. Snapshots that are useful. And in dealing with those snapshots, it leaves room for the sweeter ones to come.

Dreams are tool. A wonderful tool, and to benefit from them, good or bad, you just have to hold that tool right.

Extension of US PATRIOT Blocked...by Teabaggers?

2011-02-09T10:05:00.000-05:00

Things seemed to have backfired for House Republicans...

I have been a vocal critic of the TEA Party. I put that out there right away, because I dislike it when bloggers and journalists spin reports that praise folks when they do things that they agree with, and pretend that they were always on board with said folks. I think that as an Astroturf movement, that the TEA Party is a disingenuous sort of "movement" that manipulates real fears to political advantage for a GOP establishment, but the vote to block US PATRIOT shows chinks in the discipline of the House Republican majority, and illustrates a divide that could be the undoing of a great deal or maneuvering to capitalize on populism.

26 members of the House Republican caucus crossed party lines to stand against renewal of three key provisions of US PATRIOT. The authority to issue roving wiretaps, the library records which gives the FBI access to search records, and the "lone wolf" provision that gives authority to investigate anyone outside the country, even if they have no known ties with terrorist organizations, were defeated in a 277 to 148 vote. Defeated, because of the special expedited procedure that the House leadership wanted to push through, which required a 2/3rds majority. In wrangling to speed up the process, the House leadership handed itself a defeat of provisions that they've argued are necessary to security of the nation.

David Schweikert of Arizona, Tom Graves of Georgia, Raul Labrador of Idaho, Randy Hultgren and Bobby Schilling of Illinois, Justin Amash of Michigan, Christopher Gibson of New York and Michael Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania were among those who stepped across the aisle to oppose the move. Representative Dennis Kucinich wrangled the move, and can be credited for giving impetus for the TEA Party freshmen to put their votes where their mouths have been, in opposing "Big Government" and intrusion into privacy.

Mind you, this certainly doesn't defeat the extension of US PATRIOT by any means. The White House has asked for the extension as a tool against terrorism, and the Senate has expressed the desire to make these provisions permanent. The House can reintroduce the measures and take a straight vote, albeit somewhat longer in process, and it will pass. The Senate version is likely to pass as well, and while Eric Holder has assured the Senate that it is instituting measures suggested to assure oversight to prevent civil liberty violations already, this is somewhat cold comfort.

The real story is less about the extension of US PATRIOT though. The tools to fight terrorism that were shoehorned into US PATRIOT during the last administration were resoundingly approved by the House and Senate in their votes, and include a laundry list of powers that intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been asking for years for. On the surface, they appear to be tools that can help root out those who exploit our systems that require due process or who simply fall off the radar from investigations. The problem being that the potential for abuse under peace time considerations with the somewhat vague threat profiles and open language throw a wide net that a less than scrupulous Administration could use to ferret out undesirables. These issues remain, and will continue to be issues when the House reorders itself to bring these provisions to a regular House vote. What this does illustrate are divides that the new freshmen have with the House leadership, and where they have the potential to be a thorn in the side of the Republican leadership on issues where the GOP's support of the TEA Party by funneling cash to their "movement" may have unintended consequences, in having freshmen Congresscritters see a vulnerable establishment being liable to support the ideals and positions that they've advocated, yet voted against time after time.

The vote itself is more of a show to delay. In the long run, US PATRIOT will be renewed, and this is largely a symbolic gesture. One that freshmen Representatives can point to later on, and perhaps craft their positions from. Scott Brown of Massachusetts has angered his TEA Party supporters by his own votes, which run counter to the vocal position that many support. This vote, while symbolic, illustrates that there is potential for the TEA Party movement to become its own creature, as opposed to a vehicle for the same policies that the AEI and their Fellows have been advocating for some time, and have backpedalled from publicly only recently.

To be sure, I am not convinced that the TEA Party is terribly good for US policy, both domestic and foreign, and the movement has yet to spawn anything like sane fiscal policy, both at the state or Federal level, but as the freshmen navigate this session, there are signs that they may become less vehicles for rubber stamped support, than a genuine movement of their own, albeit somewhat late in the game. How this affects the House and Senate remains to be seen, but the discipline that the House and Senate have shown in the past may be slipping, and that means that genuine compromise may have to be reached between the two parties, and if the TEA Party can facilitate this, I may be forced to re-evaluate my opinion on what began as Astroturf.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

iPhoning it in

2011-02-07T14:53:00.000-05:00

I was a late adopter for a cell phone. I got my first only a year ago or so. I cheap LG without many features, cost about $20, and in all fairness, I only got it so that I could get in touch with my daughter while I was out in Phoenix.

I upgraded to an iPhone with some trepidation. Gal I was dating waited in line for hers, and she loved it with a glee that was frightening to behold. Aps galore, a camera, movies on demand.

It seemed all a bit too much.

When I was realized I was bound for Mesa Verde this summer, and the 3G was coming out, said iPhone gal poked and prodded me to taking her phone, and upgrading her to a spiffy new one. I put the iPhone in my pocket, and pretty much didn't use it all that much, except to call my little girl. Didn't really use the aps all that much, and I didn't really get into the text habit.

A summer on the mountain changed that.

Mesa Verde is pretty a damned isolated place. Internet connection, even through the company was spotty, at best. Even the machines that Aramark provided in our little basecamp only had occasional internet connection. If you were in camp and had a computer, WiFi signal was an on again, off again, and mostly off again, sort of premise. Being thoroughly addicted to teh Interwebz, this was not exactly ideal. Save, that pesky iPhone DID allow me to connect. And I grew to love that heavy little rectangle since it not only let me call my little girl, and text her, and get my news fix too.

The relationship with the gal who got me hooked on the phone went south, but that phone kept me hooked. As time went on, it was pretty much my conduit to the world--despite losing signal when we went up to 5000' or so. Made good friends, started texting more, and before I knew it, the iPhone was a constant companion. Google maps. YouTube. Texts beyond all reason. Skype on the dang thing. Thesaurus. Dictionary. Books upon books. Scientific calculator. More and more science and math aps than you could shake a stick at. Even got my feet wet with the goofy games. Before I knew it, my phone was absolutely one of those things I put into my pocket, even before I found my keys.

So, when my phone finally decided to stop charging, it left me with an unsettling feeling. A disquiet that I really had no idea would ever descend. Without a phone, without this phone, I am now all bereft. For someone who, up until this year, didn't even own a cell phone, now I find myself all kinds of antsy. No contact numbers to browse through. No quick finds for addresses. No Google Maps to prop up in the cup holder to find odd places. No quick note to friends on stuff that made me giggle. No fast camera to take a pic of goofiness on the road.

Yes, I am addicted. Never saw it coming, until I went to sign into Skype today, and saw that nasty red line on the battery life, and the phone defiantly refusing to charge.

Tomorrow I'm heading to the AT&T store, and see what wonders they'll put before me. 3G? 3GS? Maybe something entirely different? All I know is that somewhere between January and now, I got hooked on a goody that I never knew you couldn't do without.

Dammit.

Zen and the Art of Cooking

2011-02-05T21:50:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, the the blog Why is it Evil addressed the question of Why Chefs are Evil.

Not terrible funny, but it got me to musing.

We aren't evil.

We aren't always very nice. Because we work in a high stress job, that is part craft, part art, part mind numbing paper work, dangerous, repetitious, and filled with some of the most marginal personality motherfurkers you'll ever have the pleasure of meeting, and most of us love the profession.

We aren't good people. Mothers, don't let your daughters date a chef. She may love the after hours, she will love the food and the drink and the parties, but we WILL do bad things to her, that she will probably really enjoy.

Bourdain touches on a bit of the life in his books, but he doesn't do it justice, because most of the public simply won't believe it. Doing rails off a waitresses' bewbs in an office, while you have a full dining room and a patron locked in one of the bathrooms is, in some places, called Friday.

It is equal parts art, craft, and skill. And love for your fellow cooks. You bond as a team, and even if you hate the night, you're in there because the guy across the grill is your boy. Or girl depending on the kitchen, and that means they're family. It is a Zen profession, because the best you can hope for at the end of the night, are empty plates, and smiling patrons. And hopefully some good memories of your place.

The idea that one can't get into a routine is garbage. Cooks multi-task, we like to multi-task, we take it as a point of pride that we can do an 18 hour day, with a pot of coffee, half a pack of smokes, never sit once, clean hundreds of pounds of meat, fish, and more, and then actually prepare it, carve it into delicate and edible art, and at the end of the day, all we've got to show for it are some folks who are giddy and heading to their cars, and the knowledge that we'll do it again tomorrow, and most folks faced with that will run for the farking hills.

Most folks can't do the job that a professional chef does. Can't. Physically nor mentally. It is a hard life, it takes its toll on your body and mind, and yet, I love it. I love my crew. I love to cook, and being there for folks' celebrations. My art does that. My craft makes it affordable.

Yes, people cooked for their families for generations--but I cook for hundreds a night, night after night. My hands have touched an average of 150 dishes a night, 320 some odd nights a year, for better than 20 years now. I do things with food that your Grandma can't. Because I have more experience than she's had cooking. She does things well, and she is a master of several dishes. I have to be the master of a rotating menu, executed exactly the same, night after night, and in conditions that would make most folks flee. Professional cooks are just like any other professional. There are indeed talented amateurs who can do nice things. And that's fantastic. Prove it to me, by replicating it two dozen times a night, and a few dozen times for a few more different dishes, and do it on command.

Evil? Sometimes, but we kinda like it that way.

These are restaurant folk, in our natural environment.

The art of cooking is an odd one. It is very much a Zen profession. My craft gives me a lot of satisfaction. I love to cook. And I love to cook for people. But at the end of the day, not matter what, no matter how artful my plates are, not matter how long I take to prepare and play in the kitchen, the best I can look forward to are empty plates.
That's a good thing.

Empty plates means that people got fed. People don't necessarily remember the sauce that I did with their chicken, or the slight chocolate note--because I use cocoa, coffee, and dark beer--in my chili. They remember the time that they have with folks at the table. They remember Bob ordering the Four Alarm Penne, and him gulping water, and the laughs around the table. They remember the look in their wife's eye when she shared her truffle cake. They remember Grandma getting a little misty when the Steak and Tatty Pie was finished, and the memories of her mother's cooking getting shared around the table. If I get to spark those sorts of memories, that's exactly what I hope for. Mine is an ephemeral art. It is a Zen profession, because it doesn't last. The memories, the times shared, the people you're with, those last. I just facilitate things a bit.

We celebrate with food, and hopefully, meals are a celebration. Of time together, of people you love, of good times, or bad. We bring food to those who are in need, because we not only feed them, we share of ourselves. We may not have the words to help someone with the loss of their parents, but we can put together a meal for them. That shows our love and affection, and our care.

That's my profession. That is what I love to do. I feel enormously blessed that I can share some of the things that I've learned over the years, after hundreds of thousands of meals going through my hands. It's hard to have some pride in the skill and the craft, and you want to do what you do well, and that leads to some ego, but the one thing that handling food teaches you, is to be humble in that. Not because there is some new hotshot coming up, but because no matter what we do, ours is a basic sort of skill.

The best fish that I've ever had was in Jamaica. Fresh off the boat, right on the dock. Fileted right in front of me, slapped onto a grill with a little oil, salt and pepper, and a squoze of fresh lime, and handed to me in a paper boat, with some hot sauce in a blob on the side. Nothing fancy about it. I remember that fish, because it was perfect. Crisp skin, sweet flesh, fiery sauce, tang of the lime, it all blended together with the tired of swimming and fishing, a sweet young thing whose name I cannot remember, but she smelled of sun tan oil, the rum drinks we'd had, and maybe a hint of strawberry lip gloss. We had ice cold beer, and ate on the dock, tired, and sore, and that fish was the most pefect thing in the world. That moment is cemented in my mind because of that amazing fish.

I am grateful to that guy on the dock, because his fish made me a perfect moment. One I hope to take with me to the grave. We help cement moments in time. THAT is our professional skill. Not necessarily the cooking. Our vehicle is the food. The presentation. Food alone isn't going to do anything though. We need to share it with people. That's when it matters.

Cooking is craft. It's physics, it's chemistry, it's art, it's business, it's your life. It's not for everyone, but cooks get to bridge a lot of areas of expertise. A good cook should have some mechanical skills. Should have a good eye for color. A good nose. Ability to taste and judge how flavors will evolve is essential. Chemistry of cooking is amazingly important. Understanding of basic physics helps a lot. Understanding economic theory comes in handy when you run a joint, and you'd better get hip to HR, PR, alcohol service, licensing, food safety, a bit of biology, a bit of anatomy don't hurt, and even a little botany. For all those skills, it comes down to making memories. That's our real product.

My advice for the hobbyists? Share what you do. Don't get lost in "right way" or "wrong way."

Getting lost in minutia? It happens with a hobby. I tend to think of folks in the nerd vs geek categories for most hobbies. Be that a football stat nerd versus a football geek who paints his face and gets involved. I tend to separate folks out like that. Nerds collect--be they facts, movies, stats, they immerse themselves in the details, and love the knowledge that brings. Take pride in that knowledge. Not a bad thing. Geeks get involved. Be that dressing up, making their own films, writing their own stories, building a shrine to their favorite team, a working model of their favorite mecha. Not a bad thing either. Unless of course, it turns to obsession that divorces you from contact with folks. Be that getting so lost in stats and figures, that you lose sight of the game that you love, and instead get focused on tiny details and rules, or so lost in your creations that you don't connect with people, and get lost in your own fantasy.

Ideally, your interests help you connect, and give you a greater appreciation of skills and people. You get lost in them, then it gets weird.

Love food? Then share it. Share that love, because that's what it's about. Sharing your passion and love, with those you love. Not dunning folks who don't do it "right." It isn't up to your standard? Don't go back. Don't make that mistake in your own cooking. There is nothing wrong with being passionate about cooking. But losing sight of the connections that good cooking should bring, that's a weird and lonely road, and if you constantly harp on things done "wrong" then folks aren't going to connect with you. You alienate folks with constant tirades, then you're missing the point.

It's food. It's hopefully great. Be it a great hot dog with a home made giardinera and chili that brings tears to the eyes, or a silky smooth alfredo that you get extra bread to sop up every last drop, or a falling off the bone tender beef rib, or a galatte that melts your soul. It's food. It's basic.

It IS love, but only when you share it.

Crossposted to The Motely Moose

The Best of Cookbooks...

2011-02-05T10:21:00.000-05:00

As a chef, I often get asked all sorts of things. What's your favorite dish? What do I do with arugula? What's the best sauce? How do I cook X? Who's your favorite chef? What's the best cookbook?

These are questions that are often complicated. Favorite dish changes on a whim, because what you're in the mood for depends on the season, depends on who you're with, depends on how you feel that day. Arugula has lots of uses. Best sauce with what? Lots of ways to prepare a lot of things, so it's sort of a loaded gun sort of question.

But the last two are fairly easy for me. Hands down, it is Jacques Pepin. No question. No equivocation. Jacques is THE man in my book. An amazingly skilled chef, he is likewise a gifted teacher, an advocate for the profession, someone who loves food, and has an attitude that is generous and wide when it comes to cuisine. La Technique was a brilliant and accessible way to bring the fundamentals of French cuisine to the masses. His work and his passion earned him France's highest civilian honor, the Légion d'honneur. He is very much one of my culinary heroes.

Not surprisingly, he also wrote the cookbook that reccomend to folks who want to get their feet wet in cooking. Jacques' Art of Cooking is easily the most accessible, and best cookbook that I can recommend for beginners and enthusiasts alike. Jacques is very much a teacher, and this pair of books is not only lavish with illustrations, it is a course in cooking. From stocks to patisserie, from fish to meats, from various cutting techniquest and presentation, it is very much a course in cooking that leads one recipe at a time to teaching the fundamentals of cooking, and with step by step instructions, and each recipe builds skills to take to the next. They are an investment in skills, and when I recommend them, it isn't just for the recipes, but for what amounts to an education in the craft that I love. His enthusiasm and joy for that craft is evident, and it is a joy just to look through, and for beginners and enthusiasts alike, the pair of books are an ode to the craft and art in the kitchen, and done with simplicity an elegance.

Get these first, and take the time to sit down with them. Not just for the recipes, but for the technique and the skills that are presented. For the joy and the artistry. For the basic fundamentals that will build your own skills and develop your own eye and taste. I cannot recommned these books enough, and for the beginner, they are gold. Far more so than The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America--which is far better suited as a text for the burgeoning professional, than for laymen looking to improve their skills. The key to Pepin is always the joy of sharing, and that is what good cooking is about. Sharing with those you love, sharing good times, sharing something that is basic and commonplace, and elevated by the company.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

The Cape and Supers in General

2011-02-03T11:11:00.000-05:00

Mike Brotherton posted up a quick thought bubble on why do superheroes on TV suck ass recently. I popped him off a quick reply, and then realized that the subject is an interesting question.

We see a plethora of comics to movies today. The obvious successes like Sam Raimi's Spiderman films. del Toro's great spin on Hellboy. Jon Favreau's Iron Man. Then you get into the lesser knowns, like The Losers. 30 Days of Night. Road to Perdition. Ghost World. A History of Violence. There are high profile faves that have hit the screen, like Scott Pilgram and The Green Hornet, and then you have barely recognizable adaptations like Wanted that threw out the original comic premise for something that might be called "inspired" by the comic, while pretty much just tossing out the original. Then you have Zack Snyder doing essentially a frame by frame recreation of 300, and the same can be said for Robert Rodriguez doing much the same for Sin City--even including Frank Miller in the directing credits.

The thing Mike's blog touched on, was that TV superhero series have a spotty record. While I still have fond memories of Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman--and to be entirely fair, the woman made those big ol' granny panties work for her, so how can not love the show--and I'm old enough to remember Legend of the Superheroes. Yes, there was The Hulk. The Shazam/Isis Hour on Saturday mornings--and let's not forget Electra Woman and Dyna-Girl. The Greatest American Hero as a sort of deconstruction of the genre. The terrible Flash adaptation. Later we had a re-imagined Lois and Clark. Now, we have the almost unrecognizable Superboy in Smallville. There have been a ton of superhero series. Some fair, some not so great. Some terrible. Some, like Heroes started off with high hopes, and then sort of fell into mediocrity if not eventual collapse of anything resembling sense or structure.

Series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its spinoff Angel, fared better. Better writing was a start, and to be fair, TV has been kinder to fantasy series, and urban horror fantasy, than to straight up stories about guys and gals in capes and costumes.

In part, because, as cool as the costumes may seem on paper, when you put a grown man into spandex, you realize, that the physiques that the heroes of comics have are impossible. Not just the wasp waisted and titanic bewbs that most comic heroines have, but the men as well. Even Olympic gymnasts and swimmers fail in comparison to most superheroes. Put a costume on folks, and it gets silly fast. Even super high tech costumes like MANTIS.

TV just doesn't have the budgets to work with that del Toro and Favreau have. Or Zack Snyder can pull in. That isn't lost on TV producers either. They want the demographic, but often don't understand the audience. Yes, I'm looking at even the Sci-Fi Network. Or the SyFy Network. When a network programming lead says that she doesn't really like all that science talk or goofiness with aliens, you know that you're pretty much boned for good science fiction, and that sort of puts a damper on things like superhero spins as well. Producers who are looking to capitalize on a fad, but without understanding of the genre produce things like SuperCroc vs Gatoroid or the fifty brazillion disaster variations and the Mythological Beast Attacks of the month that SyFy has gone for in their TV movies. Or adapting straight up fantasies and slipping them in on a network supposedly devoted to science fiction. It is that lack of understanding of the genre that leads TV supers down an ugly and odd road.

Most often, it's a move to "deconstruct" the genre. Greatest American Hero. Heroes. Lois and Clark turned Superman into a romance. Smallville turns Supes into a teen angst soap opera. Why? Because those are things that the producers understand. Just give the outer veneer of a man who can fly, or a girl who can heal anything, and then turn loose the monkeys to churn out scripts filled with pregnant pauses, dewy looks that are rife with longing--which sadly usually looks like our Dear Heroine sat on a pin--and they call it a success.

This is why I chose to take a look at The Cape. I am a fan of another comic inspired series, The Human Target, though, the producers don't really tout it as a "comic series." The Human Target has been fun, and while it is a departure from the comic, in that our Beamish Boy isn't replacing his client so much, as a team related exercise in bodyguarding in a similar vein to the odd turns that Burn Notice has taken to, it is still a serviceable series. Like many comic inspired properties, the producers threw out the original, and just use the title and character names, and roll on like a big wheel. I understand this, and I've pretty much resigned myself to it.

Which is why The Cape sort of captured my attention. It's about half way through its first season, and it's taken some decent names and put them on camera. Keith David, Vinnie Jones, Summer Glau, all have some street cred for their chops on geeky franchises. It's a series that is unabashedly about a guy in a cape, and with a suitably genre background of a cop turned acrobat and stage magician, with a tricked out cape and a lot of parlor tricks he learned from a carny to fight crime, and clear his name, to rejoin his family who thinks him dead.

A lot to process? It always seems like it with superhero properties. The stream of minutia and characters and all the odd plot pieces, but then again, try distilling down the relationships and sub-plots in NCIS sometime. Comic series have their conventions, and motivations to be a hero is part of that. Our Vince Faraday has his own demons to fight, even as Bruce Wayne, or Frank Castle do. Revenge is always an easy one to understand.

The effects are not amazing. Vinnie Jones has an odd makeup as the sort of Killer Croc inspired Scales as an oddly disfugured dock boss. James Frain's Chess is a diabolical planner, and the concession to showing his ebbil is his mask on occasion, and some odd contacts when he is wallowing in his own crapulence. Faraday's cape is an odd blend of bungi effects, CGI whipping around, and folding back into his cowl. But the action isn't bad. And the story is refreshingly open as a comic series go on TV. Not lost in trying to shed being a comic inspired series, it doesn't take the angst filled road that bogged down both Lois and Clark and Smallville, punctuated with melodrama. Instead, The Cape follows a cop who wants to clear his name, and is getting used by his Circus of Crime mentor Max Malini, and Summer Glau's cryptic Orwell. He's tortured by not being able to reach out to his wife and son who think him dead, and he breaks to see his son in the guise of The Cape, inspired by his son's favorite comic.

The one thing that I like about the series is that it doesn't shy away from the comicdom it comes from. It is at least honest with itself on this, and while it isn't the quality of writing that we saw in HBO's Rome--and to be fair, there are few shows that can be held to that standard--it is at least honest about where it comes from, and the material.

Great television? Maybe not, but it doesn't suck necessarily, because it's not actively trying to be anything else than what it is. Which is actually kind of nice for a change. It gives me hope that TV producers might eventually get the concepts that make a decent superhero concept.

Perfect? Far from it, but servicable and if you like the genre, it might be worth giving a spin, at least on Hulu to try it on for size.

Al, at this point...

2011-02-02T13:30:00.000-05:00

Al Gore recently responded to Bill O'Reilly's question: “Why has southern New York turned into the tundra?”

It was a reasoned response, if you understand the issues.

“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”

“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.”

The problem is that Al Gore has tainted this issue with his insistence on framing the issue of climate change in terms of "Global Warming." It is a branding issue largely, once you dip into the science of climate change.

The problem lies in that most folks aren't dipping into the science. In framing things under the rubric of
Global Warming it not only allows misconceptions to bloom, it gives folks who reject climate change as a matter to latch onto this particular phrase. Common sense folks, who look upon these blustery, blizzardy conditions hear "Global Warming" and short circuit to themselves, "How in the hell can this man be talking warming when it's so goddamn cold?"

To be clear, the evidence that we are seeing climatic changes as a result of man made conditions is mounting. The loss in the polar caps, and the large amounts of fresh water dumped into those seas affects energy transfers across the globe. That shift in energy transfer has growing evidence of climatic shifts that do much more than simply warm or cool. It shifts energy patterns and transfers that affect weather formation, and throw off climatic systems. Moreover, the warming aspect carries with it its own dangers to throw things far enough off kilter, that the massive dump of fresh water into the poles, that it could even throw off the Great Ocean Conveyor. That would be catastrophic to current weather patterns, and the agriculture that we base our food supplies on, across the globe as a side effect. Stretches of arable land turned to desert, growth of the ice caps as fresh water is locked up, and that mass of ice furthering the size of the caps, creeping us into a return to conditions that the have more typified the Earth as of late, at least geologically speaking, with a return to another Ice Age. Currents that drive the oceans, and massive amounts of energy, as well as the oceanlife that thrive in these currents and use them shutting down would be catastrophic to more than just human life, but cause extinction events in the seas as well as on land.

That's hard to grasp, when you only talk about Global Warming.

Al Gore did a great deal to promote the idea of responsibility for our actions, and understanding of the issues at hand. Save that his insistence of the branding of the problem as Global Warming, it now serves as an umbrella to attack him for hiding behind.

We face not just global warming, but climate change on a massive scale. Weather patterns thrown off kilter, energy transfers that fuel storm patterns that we have yet to accomodate and understand. Shifts in pelagic poputions of various forms of life that affect fishing and the life cycles of many species. Framing the issue as climate change is a far more accurate form of terminology. It also gives the folks who are heavily invested in technologies and processes that fuel the problem less ground to push against, and less arguments to frame by disingenuously attacking the issue on "common sense" grounds and pointing to every blizzard and storm as asking the question of how can global warming explain these tundra conditions?

At this point, maybe Al Gore needs to step aside. Allow the argument to be framed in the way that it should have been framed from the first. Not as a matter of "warming" or "cooling" but as a matter of systemic climatic change. Yes, Climate Change is less catchy and fear-mongery, but fear mongering is not what we need. Nor pithy catch phrases. What we do need is understanding that our actions are causing shifts in global weather patterns. That will mean some folks get colder, or warmer. That rain falls that they expected will change. That the storm systems they are used to will change. That lands that were arable thanks to seasonal patterns will be affected. That the investment in infrastructure around these arable lands may become outdated, if not useless.

Gore's insistence on framing things in terms of Global Warming as a brand is hurting his own cause. And the cause of scientists who are doing good research.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose.

Bewbs in Mah YouTubes?

2011-01-31T16:23:00.000-05:00

To be entirely fair, I haven't paid much attention to YouTube for a while. Hulu and other streaming sites have kept my attention for watching stuff. Yes, there were the occasional links to the ridiculous and strange, but YouTube's takeover by teh Google, pretty much passed me by. Yes, that is old news, but I pretty much ignored the limited licenses that folks like CBS, Lion's Gate, and MGM made to offer up films. My connection has been spotty at best for a while, and this summer at Mesa Verde that connection was almost non-existent. Which explains the bareness of my post history here too. Mea culpa.

So, now that I have a strong connection, my old and slow computer is back, and my TV habit sharply curtailed by a lack of interest in sitting down with the big screen, save to play games and movies, I was surprised to see the various channels for films. Not the uploaded anime in 10 minute snippets, or films chopped to channels, but full length films that are licensed. For me, a wealth of Shaw Brothers movies makes me a happy guy.

Imagine my surprise when going through, and lo, there were boobs in mah tubes. Not porn or cam girl nudes, but the usual mild sessy that many HK films went for. Then in browsing for movie channels, realizing that there were a host of the old "nudist" films that went for the sessy stuff that tried to get around the censors in appearing to be about the nudist lifestyle. Likewise, a whole raft of the Spaghetti Westerns, and without suffering the cutting room floor. Let's not even get into the huge pile of detritus that masquerades as horror movies, made straight for video, and some of which doesn't even qualify for airing on Cinemax late at night.

I have to say, that it was a pleasant surprise. Not so much because I am starved for boobs. An American male, with an Internet connection, let's face it, I can see boobs on demand, even from my phone. Finding porn isn't exactly a difficult thing. If anything, thanks to Google, it's often a matter of making sure your Search Settings are set to at least Moderate to avoid finding out exactly how often Rule 34 is invoked. (Or how many folks apparently are really into Pokemon porn. Seriously, people, WTF?) The surprise was nice, because, let's face it, there are a lot of great films out there. Not all of them are for kids, and not all of them were just softcore dressed up for cable. I am a fan of cheesy horror. Goofy action films. Spaghetti Westerns. And in looking to finally compete against other streaming film sites, YouTube has finally become a stop for me. Because it's finally treating me like an adult.

Grown people can handle the boobs, and I don't mind a mature content warning. I'm not looking for YouTube to become a Consumption Junction clone by any means, but by providing content that isn't all PG rated, I finally have a use for the service--because before, let's face it, the sessiest you got on YouTube was aspiring camwhores practicing before heading elsewhere to monetize their assets and finding their way to a Gentlemen's Club near you. Other than seeing some kid rack himself on a skateboard. Or seeing Julia Nunes do another ukele based song. Speaking of which:

Is this an endorsement for bewbs and softcore? Well, maybe a little, because bewbs are a good thing. But less an endorsement, than a thank you to YouTube for treating me like a gottverdammt adult after so long. Bewbs aren't going to curve our spines, and keep us from winning the war, and treating the public like adults on occasion might actually keep the service relevant and useful, even to cranky bastiches like myself. Who are actually going to YouTube to look for more than just the occasional video to link into emails to woo gals with pretty gray eyes and mobile kiesters. Speaking of which, YouTube finally got some folks who revere Kyu Sakamoto. Sukiyaki was one of those tunes my mother used to sing when I was a wee boy, and finding this original video, apparently kicked up a lot of dust in the room.

Thanks YouTube for not devolving, and for becoming more useful as time has gone on. Unlike some social networks, you're actually keeping up, and that's nice to see. Some sites ARE slicker and more polished, but it's nice to see the old girl has a few new tricks, and some fun licensed content.

The TEA Party and Historical Fundamentalism

2011-01-29T12:04:00.000-05:00

Jill Lepore released The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History recently, from the Princeton University Press.

That news alone might not get folks terrible excited. While a contributor to the New Yorker, her work tends to be of a scholarly nature, grounded in early American history, and that is unsurprising given her credentials as a Harvard professor.

What she has done is shed some light onto the historical revisionism, if not outright Historical Fundamentalism that the TEA Party and their fellow travelers are now engaging in to back not just shoddy scholarship, but to make political cases for action, based on a somewhat dubious historical perspective.

My own take on the TEA Party has been one of some bemusement. Taking the name of an action where American colonists struck a blow against both the East India Trading Company, and the British Crown, who was heavily invested in said corporation, and using that name to protest, by buying tea to throw away, to be cleaned up by municipal workers, paid for by their own taxes. It is an odd disconnect.

No more so, than their own cries against what they feel oddly as "Taxation without representation!" while ignoring the sad fact that they ARE represented. The Tea Act that brought such ire, was opposed vehemently by the Colonists in that they felt that they should be taxed by their own representatives, and the British Parliament did not have any Colonists sitting. Not to mention the monopolist stance for the importation of many goods, that profited the East India Trading Company, and the British Crown who held a large interest. It is odd, since our own Representatives and Senators, and President who signs and executes the laws of our land, are all elected. The Tea Party and their fellow travelers have representation, they simply don't like the representatives that their fellow citizens have put into office.

There lies the rub. It is an odd sort of time, where folks whose candidate feel that they no longer have a voice, which says something more about how they feel representatives should operate. Representatives and Senators represent the citizens and interests of their districts and states. Not simply the ones who put them into office, but all of them. Which is sort of why we made addendum to the Constitution to guarantee protections for minority voices in the Bill of Rights. It is a telling assumption that if your side loses an election, that you will have no say, on how you and yours will operate in the majority.

That has been my impression of the TEA Party. Jill Lapore takes on the historical revisionism and new Historical Fundamentalism that is used as the basis to support stances that, to be honest, take a distorted view of history, and the intentions of our Founding Fathers.

From the separation of church and state--which the Texas School Board have taken on as an enemy of the people, and who reject the principle--to rebranding capitalism with "free trade" and slavery with the more antiseptic "Atlantic triangle trade." Likewise, the TEA Party likes to invoke the Constitution as its guide for a vision of the future, while ignoring the very Preamble to the document where the Framers put forth in clear language their purpose.

"to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

Those words are particularly telling. The Preamble clearly laid out what the People ordained the Constitution to address. Yet, we have a movement that tends to ignore the capitalized portions of the Preamble as being irrelevant...

Mind you, this is not the first time the Founders and our Revolution have been invoked for political profit. Both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists jiggered with interpretations to support their causes. Both the Union and Confederacy bolstered their cases by invoking the Founders. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked the Tea Party as a massive act of civil disobedience. Andrew Jackson portrayed his Democratic Party as the true Sons of Liberty.

It isn't just Jefferson, who has now become persona non grata, save when convenient, whose words have been taken sometimes out of context. Many use Franklin's The Way to Wealth as a base on which to found cases that we must have an aggressive defense of laissez faire policy, ignoring the fact that Poor Richard's Almanac was often a pointed satire, and full of bold and often reckless japes. Instead, we have folks who portray Franklin as a stolid supporter of things that he openly mocked. Mind you, it is not entirely surprising that his role has been reinterpreted by folks who hold that the Green Dragon Tavern, the "Headquarters of the Revolution" is no longer in Real America, as Boston is now firmly in the hands of the enemy.

Mind you, the TEA Party--Taxed Enough Already--is far from the first invocation of the imagery. In the 1970s Jeremy Rifkin's People's Bicentennial Commission formed their own TEA Party--Tax Equity for Americans. His words were that the nation needed "a new party, a movement that will treat tax reform as one aspect of a fight for genuine equality of property and power against taxation without representation." There has been a proliferation of trash thrown into the Boston harbor in protest--from the Boy Scouts dumping a cask labled "CRACK" in 1988, the Teamsters dumped beer and water and empty cases four years later in their own protests. In 1997 doctors and nurses boarded the Beaver and threw out HMO's annual reports "launching a campaign against market-driven health care." Dick Army himself unloaded a copy of the US tax code in 1997, and in 2007 Senators from Massachusetts, Texas, Georgia, and Virginia went to dump boxes bearing labels of unfunded federal mandates, like No Child Left Behind--though, to be fair, they didn't actually dump them as it is illegal to do so, but they pretended to. Which shows how far folks are willing to go to appear to be making a useful protest...

There is a move towards Originalism within our current incarnation of the TEA Party. One that carefully picks and chooses its interpretations. You have the National Center for Constitutional Studies founded in 1967 to promote the idea that the Founders had fixed and final word on the intent of the Constitution. Seemingly to flout the words of Madison in Federalist 14:

"Is it not to the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?"

And whilst trying to reinterpret the intent of the Framers, they live that lively statement, while rejecting that they are doing so, wholecloth, in trying to determine what that original intent might be.

Let's not even get into the reenactment of the Boston Massacre to promote antibussing, in 1974. The riff of using imagery of the Revolution to invoke an appeal to authority and validity of actions is not exactly a new thing.

Not just on tax policy, do we see a want of Historical Fundamentalism, but certainly, we have a renewed interest in promotion of religion by the State. From Mitt Romney's address on faith, to the renewed attacks on the separation of church and state in Texas and beyond. Mind you, flouting Madison's 1785 "Memorial Remonstrance against Religious Assessments"

"The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man."

Jefferson's own, "our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry."

Article VI of the Constitution itself: "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in the United States."

And the addendum to that, in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Mind you, those are all foundations to protect religion from the state, as much as protect the state from religion. The tides of religious fervor wax and wane, and while one faith may take public precedent, years and shifts in population can take that faith from being in the majority. That our Founders rejected the practice of the establishment of religion--as nearly every British North American colony had an established religion--is telling. Not just to protect the state, but to protect faiths. In seeking to promote faith in our state, we commit ourselves to a road that veers steadily away from those protections.

The revisionism is particularly marked when you see TEA Party advocates recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Not only forgetting the "Liberty and Justice for All" portions, but as a line drawn in the sand against the perceived socialism of our current President. If for no other reason that the Pledge was written by Francis Bellamy--former pastor of Boston's Bethany Baptist Church--who was himself a Socialist. Vice President in fact of the Society of Christian Socialists. Written for children. But, I've touched base on these forgotten pledges before.

Then again, we have seen Reagan invoking Thomas Paine, and many rushing to quote him on his beliefs on religion, whilst ignoring his equal belief in taxation and its purpose to alleviate suffering and for public works. Apparently The Rights of Man was not as popular reading as The Age of Reason. The invocation of Common Sense is sometimes mixed as well. Reagan took up that mantle, as did Ralph Reed, Jesse Helms, and Jeremy Rifkin's Peoples Bicentennial Commission against corporate tyranny, and we have Glenn Beck railing against an out of control government as well.

Ultimately, we see the forces of a Historical Fundamentalism engaging in a practice to impose their own views of history, and looking to excise views that might contradict or oppose their interpretations. Fairly modern interpretations as well. The interpretation portion I can agree is healthy. Our Constitution is a flexible document intended to flex and bow to a certain degree to the needs and will of the people. No provisions were made for women to vote, or for slavery to be ended. We have changed as a society, and that flexibility goes in tandem with Jefferson's view that "Large institutions must go hand in hand with the Progress of the human mind." What is dangerous is attempts to stifle education and dissent of other interpretations. To vilify those who have a knowledge of history, and likewise use it to counter the revisionist attempts to impose only their view of history onto not just the public, but coming generations.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose.

In a Way I Can Sort of Feel for Haley Barbour...

2010-12-21T05:14:00.000-05:00

I just don't remember it as being that bad." He goes on to talk of standing "at the periphery"

Yes, not exactly the most enlightened approach to race relations, when one is looking for a Presidential run. Especially when the defeat of the originally Republican sponsored DREAM Act just failed to pass muster. And on the coat tails of a whole lot shaking going on with charges of racism within the GOP, and much finger pointing and revisionism on the part of lots of folks on both sides of the aisle, it is maybe not the most politic time to choose to defend the White Citizens Councils, and then incite a media that is already looking to sharpen their teeth in preparation for the Presidential race to come.

Unlike the Slate article above, and the assessment that Barbour is looking to white wash his past--which is not entirely inaccurate given the current level of revisionism that is going on by many in this political climate--is, I think, simplistic, but I can feel for the man in a way.

I grew up an Army brat. By the time I was in second grade, I'd been to Okinawa, California, Texas, Maine, and South Carolina. In second grade, I lived with my Grandmother, a grand KC lady who worked at the JP Regal plant outside Whitmire. We moved to Whitmire because of my Grandmother's transfer--my father was once again on the move, and it was far more stable for me to be with my Grandmother post his recent divorce. I was already a bit of a rolling stone.

Whitmire was a grand little town. It sits right near one of the largest tracts of logging land in South Carolina. The folks who own a good sized chunk of it, and whose ancestors helped found Whitmire were our landlords and neighbors. The Bakers moved to a single level ranch that they'd built so Senior didn't have to go up and down stairs, and they put up their old family home for rent. The sons were likewise our neighbors across the highway, and in the fall, they'd give away the corn they grew to whoever wanted to pick it. They were ardent churchgoing folk. Giving, and kind, the Bakers showed my Grandmother every courtesy, and the ragged and gangly boy that came in tow as well.

Growing up in Whitmire was as close to the American Dream as I've ever seen. I rode my bike up and down streets with real white picket fences. I chased snakes and lizards through wet country, and I chased, and was chased by dogs of all shapes and sizes. In spring, I joined the throng of kids on the playground for the honeysuckle, I went to the drug store for the soda fountain, the magic tricks for a dollar, the 35 cent comics, and the Matchbox cars on a rotating display. We attended the Methodist church in town--and despite the recent assessment by the TEA Party that the Methodists are Godless Commie/Soshulists, I found them to be good and accepting people--and even the Baptists and Catholics were friendly all around.

I have many fond memories of Whitmire. It was a grand and glorious time to be a kid. Deep in the South, it gave me a love of that country, the sound of the katydids and frogs in summer, the sight of a water moccasin sunning itself on a log out back before it got up the gumption to go kill something, the sight of my Great Grandmother running a lawnmower over a nest of copperheads and then passing out in the middle of the yard after the explosion of snake parts across it. I was baptized there. I went to Sunday School, I met a girl that I suspect was my first crush but didn't have the words for it at the time. I made great friends.

It wasn't until years later that I began to have some disquiet about those years. Because it wasn't until I was in high school that I realized something.

I was an Army Brat. I attended more schools than I attended grades. A year was a luxury in a lot of cases. I got to make friends fast, and on base schools, or at least schools with bases near by, the military brats need that skill. Because of that upbringing, I was used to all sorts of kids. I had a Puerto Rican/Filipino babysitter who pretty much laid out what I consider attractive--my father dated, but I didn't really have a single "mother" figure, so I blame Isi for my love of dark girls with cobra black hair, and Catholic school plaid skirts. Black, brown, yellow, sallow, pale, mixed up kids with even more complicated backgrounds than my own German-Irish-Japanese heritage were more the rule than the exception. I didn't really think on it much until later years--and when I realized that my Grandmother was a little bit racist, in the sort of institutional way that many of her generation were. Pickaninny was just how she said "cute black child." She didn't mean anything disparaging, but that was how she was raised. She got over it in later years, but it was a revelation to me when I remembered some of the things that she'd say. She was my Grandmother after all, she helped raise me, after all. But, I realized, even at a young age, that we saw people in very different lights.

Whitmire was, as I said, an idyllic town. It was a slice of Apple Pie America.

I don't remember one black face in my school. Not even a janitor.

Mind you, this is in the Deep South.

There were plenty of black folks working at the plant. Plenty in Newberry, Clinton, and Greenwood. But not one dark face in my school. Not one. Which, in second grade, I didn't really notice too much. The previous few years had been busy with moving and a divorce, and all sorts of things. I was just glad that the teachers smiled, they dealt with my restlessness and precocious energy, and treated me gentle. It wasn't until later that I realized that something was odd there.

As I said, these were folks who had an enormous capacity for kindness. The church did all sorts of outreach to the poor around Whitmire. The Bakers were deeply involved with all sorts of charities, and giving to the community. Personally, I've never felt safer than in that town--everyone knew everyone, and they all looked out for one another. This is, of course, through the skein of eyes from a second to third grader, but that is how I remember Whitmire. Safe, kind, and so much the sort of place that so many Americana bands like to invoke.

But, there still wasn't a single dark face that I remember in that Methodist Church. Or in my school. Or in our neighborhood.

I can understand a certain degree of insulation on the part of Governor Barbour. I experienced it myself. A separatism that isn't so much institutional, as much as it is social. I can't imagine Mrs. Lemon dealing with any child without love and kindness. She was a grand little woman, with a huge heart, and easy smile, and she managed our classes with wit and humor, and nothing but affection for her students. The Bakers were equally kind. But, that doesn't change the equation, that in many places, such separatism is normalized. Not overt, not handed down by night stick or threats, but still, houses don't come up for rent, jobs dry up, and heck, John at the plant knows a guy who can get your wife a job over in Newberry, and I know a guy who has a great place on the other side of town that would be a damn sight closer for both of you...

Not mean spirited, but folks seem to know where folks stick to their own kind.

I understand the world that Barbour grew up. Mind you, the White Citizens Councils may have put on a nice face for young folks, but their purpose was hardly the soda fountain world that I grew up in, in Whitmire. And mind you, my experience in the South was twenty years removed from the pains of desegregation. Which, in some ways, makes the whole thing more insidious as I have grown older. Barbour wants to paint an ideal for the voters--because many don't want to confront their own prejudices, and their own history.

The South is impossible to put into perspective without the context of slavery, the War Between the States, and the Reconstruction. It is a land rife with beauty, and pain, and joy, and all wrapped up together. It is much like watching that water moccasin sunning itself in the morning. There is beauty there, and respect for the danger, and the threat of very real violence and death, but that's all wrapped up and bound up with beauty and a love for the land and the people around you too.

Even the racist ones. Like my Grandma, who was a little bit racist. She was my Grandma, and I love her, but I also learned from her mistakes. And I'm glad that my father did as well, and raised me up to not care so much about color as character. Well, that, and for that babysitter who set me on the path for dark haired, dark eyed girls who like tartan.

Barbour made a decision to paint events in the best possible light. He did so out of his political ambitions, and to try to appeal not so much to the voters in the North, or the Mid-West or the West, but to appeal to those who don't like to admit that they were deep in a movement to restrict rights. They tried to prettify it up by calling pride, calling it keeping neighborhoods safe, protecting their own or whatever excuse was used, but in the end, it was about keeping folks out and down. His sin, wasn't that he white washed, but that he was trying to protect the honor of folks who had little.

But I understand that sin. Because I grew up in the South. I grew up with a kind teacher, and a minister with an endless capacity for questions from a child raised up a Buddhist, and who let the kids out of Bible School early to go berry picking. The South is rife with all sorts of contradictions and duality. While Barbour is going to have to face the distortions that he's made over the years--and as a politician, it's sort of expected--I can understand his desire to protect the folks that he grew up with, his own heroes. The difference is, many Southerners come to grips with that Dame Bitch Duality, in love of place, and full knowledge of history.

The problem is, that when we look to revise history for the comfort of those around us, we forget the words of George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And if anything, the history of the South screams for remembrance. Not just for slavery, not just for Jim Crow, not just for lynching and the institutionalized racism that became so endemic that it stains the character of the South today, but the carpet baggers and the sins of the Reconstruction that helped fuel that anger and focus it on the faces of those freed slaves as a symbol. While many in the GOP are using Barbours remarks to try to paint the Democrats with the brush of the 50s--and it is likewise damn foolish for Democrats to try to forget Robert Byrd's own history. Or that Strom Thurmond started out as a Democrat, and changed party in 1964.

It's not simply a sin of trying to spare feelings--and that I understand--but the real sin is trying to spare feelings that NEED to preserved. We need to understand the hurt. We need the context, and that is the real sin here. We need that pain, to remember it, so that we don't let it happen again.

Already, we have folks who are clamoring for controls on Muslim Americans. Forgetting the lessons that my mother's people faced with the Internment. We cannot simply pooh pooh on history that doesn't fit narrative. We need it.

I understand the discomfort, and I understand the desire to protect ones' own. I get that portion of the show. To preserve honor and dignity for those you love. But some things, we can't just wash away. Some stains need to stick around, so you learn from them.

**As an aside, I suggest a small side jaunt from Governor Barbour and his bending of the truth.

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension in American Racism.

I found it fascinating, and it reminds me a bit of some of the intentionally segregated gated communities in Atlanta, as affluent black couples move back to the South, and form their own communities, which likewise shut out not just pale faces, but dark faces who were born in ATL as well...

Crossposted to The Motley Moose"

Oh Spam Folder, How Do I Love Thee

2010-12-06T17:32:00.000-05:00

Today I cleaned out the Spam folder. With Gmail, that's not such a big thing, but since I'm waiting on a phone call or two, I figured I'd poke around a bit.

There was the usual tripe. Newsletters I've never gotten around to canceling, great deals on flowers, much Viagra and other products to enhance the male physique. Some interesting attempts to Phish for my credit information. But the real gems this go around were from a couple of lovely ladies.

First was Mrs. Lilian Jones. Hers was a tragic tale; esophageal cancer, living in Dubai, a very Christian woman whose only joy in these last few months of her life are to distribute her great fortune that she has collected for charities, but her bankers are not trustworthy, or so it seems. All she needs is a little assistance in getting the funds to collect the funds to be dispersed. Luckily, she did have the name of her trusted attorney, an understanding soul by the name of Joe Benson, and apparently, he was more easily contacted than Mrs. Jones. She blessed me several times in this missive.

I very nearly wept. Dying of cancer, and she blesses me? I needed a moment.

Next though, was a lass by the name of STORMY. I was drawn to her note, because she asked that Let's make it Working. With English skills so polished, how could I resist? And upon opening the missive, there were attachments! Apparently STORMY was an attractive girl, nubile and maybe 20. She was apparently looking at my email address, and thought that we should strike up a conversation. To commemorate our friendship, she sent two very steamy little attachments, that in all modesty, I didn't feel appropriate to open. A gentleman doesn't save trophies from egirls who send them unsolicited photos, it's rude and improper. What if I were the sort of brute who would do things while looking at said pictures? It was a sordid scene in my head, and while I could appreciate a random hottie with photos from what appeared to be two different girls in states of undress, asking me to download her pics, and then mail her begging for more, I feared that this naive girl would soon be taken advantage of. I didn't want to lead her on, after all. I've been hurt before...

The women put me in a mood though, and with a slightly depressed mind and soul--one so ill and so concerned for the welfare of others, and the other so naive to reveal so much of herself online--I scrolled down further. There was a shining jewel of hope, in amongst all these attempts to Phish for information, or sell me blue pills. One Miss Louise Boss sent me a message that I was a lottery winner, one from Amsterdam. I don't even remember entering and I was going to scroll down, when I saw a Big Red Banner through the mail! It was a warning! That THIS mail might not be who it claimed it was from! How very shocking! BUT, lucky for me, the folks who inserted this clever banner into Miss Louise Liar's mail, they were offering their services to clean my computer of malicious malware that just LOOKING at these sorts of emails could infect a computer with. All I had to do to cleanse my computer--and my soul--was to click the handy link on the banner, and their automated process would cleanse me, and send me back into the fray. Finally, someone who was just looking to do a good deed.

Truly, one can feast upon the milk of human kindness when one opens one's Spam Folder. It heartens me that there are some decent souls who seek only to do good in this world. Now then, if I just right click--->open new tab, that should do it...

++++**NO CARRIER**++++

...dammit...

Lance Henriksen can make it better...

2010-11-26T11:49:00.000-05:00

My premise is simple. The inclusion of Lance Henriksen can make even the most unpalatable of projects better.

It is a corollary to my theory that Kate Beckinsale is the Anointed Bhodisattva of Suck. I posit that Kate is a karmic test for directors. If they can resist the siren call of her sweet looking self, and the hordes of fans that will show up to see her dressed in something skimpy, torn, wet, or otherwise revealing, or the possibility of such an occurrence, then they have an even chance of making a decent film. I have only the Underworld films, Pearl Harbor, The Aviator, or even Van Helsing as my proof. Directors who had some track record, some success, and blew it by the addition of The Flavor of the Month. Well, I take that back, Underworld was directed by her boyfriend who had no directing chops under his belt, but damn those were poor films, and I stand by her being a karmic test. Kate Beckinsale can take even gifted directors down the road for a poor film. The notable exception being Kenneth Branagh who cast her in an ingenue role. He was spared in Much Ado About Nothing, for she had not yet assumed her great role in the Universe's balancing.

The Universe is perhaps not kind--the Long Dark between solid bodies will kill us all without a shed tear, and with little fanfare with a cast of radiation from a wandering body bursting with light and energy or smash us all and leave the world to the insects and squid to rise as the next species batting for intelligence--but it is fair. In that cosmic fairness, for Kate Beckinsale, we have been gifted with an actor of the likes of Lance Henrikson.

Lance grew to fame in geek circles with his role as Bishop in Aliens. Though, to be fair, he was in The Terminator long before that. And let us not forget Pirhana Two: The Spawning. And Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Right Stuff--you know, little art house stuff. But after Aliens, Lance's career took an odd turn. Not as odd as, say, Tim Thomerson, who gifted New Moon Cinema with scintillating performances like Doll Man, but Lance has made an impressive number of B-Pictures. His IMDB credits are longer than many actors have had lines. Mind you, he hit B-Films in what was a new Golden Age for B-Movies. Near Dark. Pumpkinhead. Excessive Force. Knights. Here was a man who could seamlessly go from calling up a hillbilly vengeance demon, to cop, to secret agent, vampire, to corrupt sheriff, to a blood sucking cyborg, to voicing cartoons, and back to serious roles, and then mainstream television, even voice parts for video games. It didn't matter, since they all paid with coin of the realm, and Lance gots kids to take care of. And a couple of ex-wives too. There are few actors who have had as varied a career as Lance has had. And, I posit, that he is the reverse of Kate Beckinsale.

Now then, let's not get it screwed up that Lance has not been involved in some films and series that did, shall we say, less than well? But, his films have something that a great many of the straight to video crowd didn't have: Lance Henriksen. As a presence on film, he is the sort of actor that demands a certain amount of respect. Much like Keith David. He has a gravitas on screen, that means he can be spitting up what looks like a mix of corn starch and heavy cream, and still, folks are riveted by that gravelly voice, and it gives weight to a film. Even a bad film. Even Pirhana Two: The Spawning.

Or Knights. Here is a film that should have been gawd awful. Kathy Long was a female kick boxing champ. She was known for being a damn determined fighter, if not just a little on the mean side. She was also moderately pretty. Which in the 90s was more than enough. Cyborg had made a ton of cash on video with the Van Dammage. There were a ton of new martial arts movies all over the place, and not a lot of women in leading roles, so I can see the pitch for this film being made, and let's face it, Albert Pyun, directed Cyborg. Nemesis. The above mentioned Dollman. Heck, Kickboxer 2 and 4. He was THE guy to go to make a cheap movie with asskickery. So, Kathy Long is cast as our heroine, a naive girl taught to fight by Kris Kristofferson to battle blood drinking cyborgs. That's right Kris Kristofferson. AND Lance Henrikson. In a cyborg vampire movie.

And it was pure gold. Didn't make a ton of cash, but the movie should have had everything against it, and yet, it is funny, the action isn't bad, Long is a terrible actress, but you didn't watch the movie for her emoting, but to see her touchis in skimpy clothes, and her beat the hell out of guys. And then, out of the blue, you have Kris Kristofferson AND Lance Henrikson having a great time. For those who watched the movie, or plan to, you can see where Kristofferson stole a lot of his character for the Blade movies from this one.

It's a movie that should have been terrible. Just cringe worthy, but somehow, it pulls it out. And I leave that up to Lance, who tore up the screen with equal parts camp, and gravitas. His voice rolls out and you have to smile.

And that's how it is with much of his work. Horrible films are made palatable by the inclusion of Lance Henriksen. Even in cameos, like in Aliens3. Or Hellraiser: Hellworld. Or The Mangler 2--yes, Virginia, they made a sequel. Lance makes even terrible films watchable by his presence. He may not be able to turn them into gold, but he can mitigate even a terrible script to palatable. Put him in a video game, and you have legions of geeks smiling when they hear him. He, like Keith David, is a mark of quality, and part of that is his strong presence, and part, the fact that folks know he's put in his dues. He's no shrinking violet or tantrum throwing star, he's a guy who will throw up Karo and be chucked into a set to appear as a torn up android on command. He doesn't have a huge amount of pride to keep him locked in his trailer, she's a trouper, and folks know it. And that shows on screen. God Love him for it too, because his presence has made a ton of films that could have been absolutely horrible, into gems that maybe didn't bring in bank, but they certainly made folks smile.

Lance Henriksen. The Savior of B-Film. I salute thee, sir. I salute thee.

The Patchwork Nation

2010-11-20T11:56:00.000-05:00

One thing that has been driving me insane over the last few years is the driving home of this Red State/Blue state "wisdom." The idea of Real America vs a Faux-America, and the resultant polarization of our politics in the idea that you're "with us" or "against us."

And in that feeling, we have this idea that we are divided nation, who either loves or hates the country depending on what button you push at the polls, or which circle you fill on the ballot.

Dante Chinni and James Gimpel have proposed a new model for looking at the nation, beyond the simple Red State/Blue state idea. After two years, journalist Dante Chinni, and professor of government a the University of Maryland, James Gimpel, PH.D, have worked on The Patchwork Nation project. It has proposed a new way to look at the nation, beyond just the regional work of Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America. Based more on the work of urban theorist Richard Florida, and journalist Bill Bishop--whose The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans is Tearing Us Apart is a fascinating read when you have the time--they examine the socio-economic and cultural divides that have sprung up in our society, and how communities across the web of counties across the nation more resemble one another than just the rubric of Red State/Blue state polarization would suggest.

For Chinni and Gimpel, they examined all 3,141 counties across this nation. With some statistical analysis of median age, income, ethnic make up, growth, housing, and cultural influence, they created a model that breaks counties down into twelve types.

Boom Towns--384 counties, with 59.3 million people. Wealthy and growing, like Eagle, Colorado. Lavish before the economic downturn, and rapidly growing communities invested heavily in construction and growth.

Campus and Careers--71 counties, with 13.1 million people. Clustered around college campuses and heavily invested in the industries that their universities are sponsoring, and emerging technologies.

Emptying Nests--250 counties, with 12.1 million people. Where Boomers and retirees are settling for their sunset years, sometimes with fixed incomes.

Evangelical Epicenters--468 counties, with 14.1 million people. Full of young families, often poorer than the national average, but with great faith, often in clashes with the other religious tribes in their midst.

Immigration Nation--204 counties, with 20.7 million people. Mostly in the Southwest, with high Hispanic populations, lower than average incomes, and a higher than average poverty.

Industrial Metropolis--41 counties, with 53.9 million people. Bastions of industry, densely packed, younger, more diverse than average, and packed with neighborhoods that are often as different as night and day.

Military Bastions--55 counties, with 8.4 million people. Packed around our nation's military bases, with middle income families of soldiers, and those who service our bases, and deeply tied to the deployments and families of those who are left behind.

Minority Central--364 counties, with 13.5 million people. African American and Native American populations mark these communities, and often lower income and high poverty rates, with often very divided communities where race is concerned.

Monied Burbs--286 counties, 69.1 million people. Higher than average education, higher than average income, and often evenly split between parties, and opportunities for dropping relative wealth here and abroad.

Mormon Outposts--44 counties, 1.7 million people. Mostly in the Mountain West, heavily Mormon, and often rural and sparsely populated.

Service Worker Centers--663 counties, 31 million people. Centers of tourism or mid-sized towns, where employee benefits are often sparse, and folks are often only seasonal.

Tractor Country--311 counties, 2.3 million people. Farming and agribusiness rule these counties' economic base, and often white, rural, and remote.

The one problem that I've always had with Garreau's Nine Nations, was that Northampton, Massachusetts shares more in common with Durango, Colorado, than it has in common with Boston or even the Cape. Yet, there is a tendency to throw NoHo in the same category as Boston because of the locale. While Mainers share many traits, Portland is a far different place than Skowhegan. And their voting history are far different as well, and the economies and culture are far removed. The communities of the Finger Lakes are a far different lot than the folks living in New York city, and the breakdown that Chinni and Gimpel have worked out, while some may argue is arbitrary, gives us a wider picture of the forces that work on disparate communities that often share demographics, employment and income figures, and mores. Economics, politics and culture play a role as well. While Presidential elections hinge on the electoral fall of the chips, the Chinni and Gimpel model is a tool that may become increasingly useful to help folks strategize their approaches to elections, and gives us a more complete picture than the simplicity of Real America vs the Fake America that divides and dumbs down the national debate.

Chinni and Gimpel traveled to each county across the country to gather not just data, but to talk to folks in each of these communities. Those anecdotal stories are without irony, and build up a picture of each representation, the people within, and the challenges that they face. While the simplicity of thinking of the country as just Red or Blue makes for easy graphics in the news, it does us a grave disservice, even for those of us who are still invested in Party. Republicans from Boston are a bit different than Republicans in Nixa, Missouri. While Palin's political base can draw from Evangelicals, it often alienates her from those in the Industrial East. And understanding these differences, and how disparate communities across the nation can share values and mores, as well as similar economic challenges can bring us, as a nation, closer together.

If you haven't looked at the Patchwork Nation project, I urge you to at least peruse it, as a better tool, or at least as a springboard for thinking about the nation less as polar opposites. It is a project that helps bring into focus better the disparate nature of the nation and her communities, as much as Strauss and Howe brought lifecycle influence better into focus with Generations and their cyclical model of generations in this country.

Crossposted to the Motley Moose.

Forgotten Pledges...

2010-10-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

From Newest Farkstuff

Been a while since I posted, but given the recent flap with Carl Paladino's speech on the dysfunction of homosexuals, the flap over the "Ground Zero Mosque" and the upcoming upcoming trial of Ahmed Kalfan Ghailani, I thought it was important to remind folks of pledges made some time ago.

Most Americans of an age, started their school days with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. I have no doubt that most American reading this can recite the Pledge from memory, and without really thinking on it too much. Announcements, turn to the flag, find out what's for lunch in the cafeteria, discover that the football team is getting out early for a game, and realizing that means all the cheerleaders will be leaving too. Which was, perhaps good news for some, and heartbreak for others who pined for the lovely ladies with the short skirts and pom poms, or the strapping young men destined for the gridiron later that day.

We have said these words, over and over again. Automatic response, hand over heart, eyes often vaguely glazed. In repetition, we grew familiar, and reflexive. And the words, and the oath lost its power.

There is debate over the place of the Pledge of Allegiance. It's language, its purpose, the use of God and the separation of church and state, but that debate can be set aside for a moment, when you have to ponder how often folks in power, as of late, have forgotten the promises made, and that we made daily.

For all the jingoist patriotism that has been bandied about in the last election, and now as we hear condemnations against so much, and this particular Administration, I thought it wise to bring up the Pledge. Especially for the brand of patriots who want Americans to regain their pride, to resist the siren call of Socialism, the homosexual agenda, the rising threat of Islam and Sharia law in this nation.

These fair weather patriots have forgotten their basic and oft repeated oath.

I Pledge allegiance
To the Flag
Of the United States of America
And to the Republic for which it stands
One nation
Under God
IndivisibleWith Liberty and Justice for all

You will note, that in that pledge and promise, that we have sworn, over and over again, thousands of times over the course of our lives, that our nation is a Republic, that we've sworn our loyalty and faith to that system of governance. Not just to one party, but to the nation as a whole. One nation. Not simply "Real America" and the heck with those faux Americans who live in the original Thirteen Colonies, with their fancy book learning and where the history is kept. To not contemplate the division and secession of parts because we don't like what our neighbors are doing. That we are united as a nation. Single and indivisible. Not Red states vs Blue states. Not just America until the gub'mint does something to piss me off.

You will note, the last portion. "With liberty and justice for all." That part is more telling. More important. That is the promise of our nation. Liberty and justice for all. Not just Christians. Not just citizens. Not just straight people. Not just those with money in the bank, or property. But all.

It is a shame that so many have forgotten their oaths. That so many seem to think that the Fourteenth Amendment is inapplicable today.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

I have bolded the important parts of Section One. The parts that folks who've sworn their allegiance to the Republic, and the basis of our law and citizenship.

You will note, that Section One doesn't say, "Any persons but the homos" or "Any person but dirty Muslims" or "Any citizen" even. But simply "any persons." Equal protection of the law. Equal. Not just a little bit, but equal. As in the same protection of the law.

We have repeatedly sworn to uphold the Republic. Using the flag as symbol of that Republic, we have sworn to uphold her promise of liberty and justice for all, and it is a shame that so many who claim to love this land, this nation, have forgotten their oath. To uphold liberty and justice for all, and then tirelessly work to limit the rights of homosexuals, who should have equal access and protection under the law to marry and live their lives with dignity, to be the same as all others. To try to demonize and limit the rights of Muslims to practice their faith, to build and prosper within the communities that they live in. To cry and wail on the right to a speedy trial, and work to limit and even deny folks the right to a trial.

It is a shame that so many, who claim to love their country, have forgotten their oaths, and we are damned by this lack of faith, and this lack of vigilance to to uphold the ideals of our nation, that we have so often sworn to.

I ask that maybe it's time to remind folks what they pledged to do, over and over again, and to remind them of what it means to be Americans, and what we hold most dear and precious. Because it seems that a lot of folks have forgotten that oath, and our values.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose.

A Positive Side Effect

2010-04-02T02:29:00.000-04:00

One positive side effect of the recent financial debacle, and the drying up of credit, is that America may get back to a something we've not done in a while: exercise fiscal restraint.

With the easy credit markets, and many financial institutions and businesses living essentially in their overdraft protection, constantly servicing debt, as opposed to paying down principle, and taking out loan after loan to fuel expansion for the sake of, on paper, to "grow" while only spiraling further and further into new conditions of debt. While old loans are refinanced, the principle and the level of debt continues to weigh companies down. While conditions improve in the short term, many firms both small and large have been carrying what George Cloony's "Ryan Bingham" called his "backpack" and those backpacks being chock full of obligations that created decision trees that were predicated on carrying debt with them, and only looking for resolutions that kept them solvent, and what many called a "discipline of debt."

Now, we are faced with a "discipline of cash." Oddly enough, living within our means, and making decisions based on what we actually earn, and to think twice about our decisions about the long term consequences of spending. Instant gratification that our "easy credit" markets created led to decisions that were based on the assumption that we could just "roll over" our debt and come out without consequence.

And that led us far from the fiscal restraint and good fiscal decision making that created that boom in the first place. Credit, and easy access to it, made our businesses agile and quick to adapt to new markets. Likewise though, we are now adjusting to a new reality where cash is king, and your business will grow only when you can afford to do so, not when you can "afford" a new loan, and hope to keep it serviced. Call it restraint or austerity, but it means a firmer foundation for our businesses, and our investments. Or at least for a majority of the small businesses and the lesser sized companies.

The largest customers, they are still looking for new conquests. But from a economists' standpoint, the give and take, and relative lack of growth can be seen as a positive thing: stability for our markets. People living within their means, and only incrementally growing makes for a lousy return for speculative investments, but it is that very stability that can make for long term investments based on sound and thoughtful business practice.

It does go against the "Boom-Bust" cycle that the American economy was slaved to for most of its existence. Which wiped out many a fortune until finally measures were taken to enact protections that many firms have been fighting against, and looking for a lookey-loo around for some time.

It does mean that growth will be slower for some time for many. It means less opportunity to grow hard and fast, but living within one's means brings a stability that encourages confidence, and public confidence means a less rambunctious and less radical investment schemes.

Cross-posted to The Motley Moose

Kangbashi--Ghost Town

2010-03-30T01:38:00.000-04:00

The Kangbashi district of Ordos City in Inner Mongolia illustrates the exact reason that the US has little to fear from China's saber economic saber rattling.

While the US housing and banking markets are recovering, with the Chinese holding a fair amount of US debt, and many fearing the day when the Chinese start demanding bills come due, we have to remember the symbiosis that our markets and the Chinese now exist in.

Ordos City was established to be prefecture seat, and a highlight of the economic boom that the Chinese have lashed themselves to. Inner Mongolia bloomed with a thoroughly modern city, created from scratch. The Kangbashi District is its jewel, with high rises, daring architecture, and lavish infrastructural amenities that rival many Western cities, it is also damn near empty and unused. Of the 1.3 million or so residents of the city, most are the workers actually building this marvel in the Mongolian desert.

The Ordos Museum is an impressive structure, a marvel of the new style of Chinese public buildings, designed to wow the rest of the world, as well as impress and instill pride in the residents and their countrymen. It is also rarely visited, save by those who are putting the finishing touches on the structure, and to take photos for promotions to try to lure folks to the Mongolian desert.

The real estate bubble in the West was devastating. The housing bubble here in the US was dotted with developments that were bought to be flipped, and fueled by rampant speculation. We were, however, amateurs to the scale that the Chinese have invested in their own real estate bubble. While neighborhoods were fabricated for growing cities, the Chinese were betting on creating whole cities whole cloth, and it is this very reason that, while the amount of US debt in Chinese hands is a matter of some concern, we have little to fear from the Chinese rattling economic sabers. While indeed they own a fair amount of our debt, they need that interest at this point just to survive, and we exist now in a form of economic symbiosis that neither the US nor China can even think about extricating ourselves from any time soon.

The boundless optimism that dominated the last several years, with dreams of nothing but wealth spiraling upwards wasn't just a Western conceit. While there may have been the clucking of tongues at the waste and recklessness of US regulatory bodies with our own investment in financial fictions, at the same time, our economic partners were using the wealth that they were skimming from our loan structures, and their own investments in ways that were both impressive, and in their own way, filled with as much hubris and and fiscal hallucination.

While there are economists who are worried what the real estate bubble in China looks like, with such a huge investment by the Chinese government into what amounts to ghost towns, it only illustrates that the Chinese are going to need our interest payments for some time, and while there may be hardliners who may think about trying to squeeze a bit, ultimately, our interests and the Chinese are interlinked. Our debt, and the servicing of that debt, may be the only thing that can save the Chinese from economic implosion.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Why Does Liz Cheney Hate America So Much?

2010-03-15T13:00:00.000-04:00

There has been a fair amount of push to derail the Justice Department from doing their job. And one of the culprits of this idiocy has been Liz Cheney. Her latest efforts to keep her father's involvement in less than savory practices during the last Administration has come from a web based attack on our own Justice Department.

Keep America Safe is ironically named, because its rasison d'etre is to keep American justice from playing out. By targeting attorneys doing pro bono work and providing the legal counsel that is every accused's right in this country, she condemns not only these attorneys, but our entire system of justice.

I am hardly the only Republican who thinks her witchhunt is a bad idea. I join Ted Olson, Bush's own Solicitor General, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, David Rivkin, Lee Casey, and even Kenneth Starr.

"I of course think it’s entirely appropriate for members of the legal profession to have provided legal services to detainees. It is a part of the responsibility of lawyers and in the finest tradition of the profession to represent unpopular persons who are caught up in the criminal justice system or even in the military justice system. I think that people who do so, do so honorably.”

“But I also think that some of the people being highly critical now of the criticism of the lawyers in the Justice Department, have been completely silent when it came to attacks — vicious attacks — on lawyers in the Department of Justice and the Defense Department who were providing legal assistance and advice to the United States of America during the last administration in connection with the attacks on the United States by terrorists.

“So lawyers should be encouraged to provide legal advice conscientiously to their clients. And that goes for people in the Bush administration and the Obama administration."

Mind you, Liz Cheney is hardly alone in this effort, and her partner in all this, Bill Kristol, has long been an opponent of reason, or justice. Sadly, Bill Kristol has best been summed up in his career as of late by Jon Stewart: "Oh Bill Kristol, are you EVER right?"

Inherent to our justice system is the right to counsel. Even the worst has the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. That is how our system of justice works, it is that assumption that is the cornerstone of our courts. While the public, and those in the military, and even our own agents may know and have witnessed folks doing horrible things, even the worst get their day in court. At least, that is the promise that we have made to ourselves. That we will apply justice fairly and evenly, and that the attacks on attorneys who are providing defense for those accused is very much in keeping with the tradition of our courts. Even going back to our Revolutionary days, when John Adams defending British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.

What bothers me about this idiocy, isn't that Liz and Kristol and the rest of her band of insincere asshats think that folks are guilty--they may very well be--but that they wish to interfere with the justice process, and short circuit it.

"They hate us for our freedoms!" is a common tirade for our War On Terror. The problem being, when we short circuit our system of justice for short term gain, we lose any hint of a moral or ethical high ground, and it only proves that terrorists can cow the greatest nation on Earth. When we pull back from the principles that this nation is founded upon to tuck our tails between our legs out of fear--or worse, out of expediency--we only give those enemies ammunition for their cause.

Moreover, that Liz Cheney's involvement is a thinly veiled attempt to shield her own father's possible malfeasance and to throw folks off the trail to track down how badly our own legal and ethical standards were skewed in the capture of many of our detainees is not lost. The raft of appearances to shed investigations and introspection at the policies that have ballooned Gitmo, and other holding facilities, and often without the process of law place the Cheneys and their supporters at the AEI on not only the wrong side of the law and history, but against the very foundations of our rule of law.

Liz: why do you hate America so much?

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Conflation is not causation

2010-03-12T11:16:00.000-05:00

Let's just get this out of the way: Jonah Goldberg is a fatuous, disingenuous ass that wouldn't know decent scholarship if it came up and punched him in the face. And decent scholars should be doing that for the idiocy that he has poured into his pean to appease those who don't like the current trend that sections of the GOP are taking, Liberal Fascism.

I pop the pic up early, to just get that out of the way. Whether or not the current NeoCons like it or not, their policies have a certain ring. By using a tool like Goldberg, and conflating ideologies and political systems that were long in opposition to one another, our beamish boy tries to swing a semantical bat to knock Fascism and Communism, and Socialism all into the same vat. Revisionism is nothing entirely new, and the push to cast Nixon as a Fallen Hero, or Reagan as a fiscal Conservative is just part of the push to try to lionize the past, and ignore the fallout of failed policies, while demonizing opposition who just plain pantsed you in the last election.

Thinking people would, you might assume, take inventory after a loss like the last one. Losing the House and Senate should have been a wake up call, but instead, it was a signal to turn up the Wing Nut Brigade to higher decibels and damn the torpedoes, it was straight ahead. And McCain's campaign foundered on those rocks. Rather than take that as a sign, that perhaps a change in policy might be in order, the GOP leadership has instead invested in simply revising the past and "changing the tone" again.

By investing in revisionists to recast the past in a new light, and simply excise the parts that might be embarrassing--like supporting Saddam in his fight against Iran, forgetting the USA's part in toppling the democratically elected government in Iran in the 50s, which set the stage for the rise of Fundamentalist Islamic Statists, or Reagan's profligate spending--and write a new "narrative."

For the record, I really hate the new term "narrative" at least in the context of public relations. It does show how removed folks are from reality in that they figure that they can simply spin a tale out of cherry picked facts, and ignore those that simply are inconvenient. The revisionists are looking to recast their tired and trite ideas that failed, and poison the waters for those who oppose them. The push to turn "Progressive" into a conflation with "Liberal Commie Scum" and likewise to push the idea that Commie-Pinko Scum are actually Fascists too, is a trite attempt to turn charges away from themselves--and after support of US PATRIOT and other attacks on personal liberties it's ironic to try to level the fascist bar against others.

Worse, you have an incestuous circle of folks who pat one another on the back for "exposing" this insidious plot to plant ideas into our youth and culture. Beck exposes the horrible plot to weave Progressive/Liberal/Fascist lies into music. You have Krauthammer pounding away at his own disingenuous drum, and Kristol and Goldberg hitting their own notes to try turn the ship of state from its disastrous course away from shooting people up across the world, and getting our economy back on track. And what bothers me about all this, is that it is an attempt to turn the GOP, and the country, away from saner voices.

The conflation to paint Progressives and Moderate voices of the GOP into monsters, and the gross revisionist plays at rewriting history, even only years ago to ignore inconvenient facts, is desperation in the face of failures, and rather than admit that the Neoconservative policies have failed both our security and our economy, they are doubling down on stoopid, and hoping that the American public is dumb enough to fall for it. And that right there shows the lack of respect that these tools have for the American people. That they have to resort to semantic slight of hand, and gross revisionism to work their way out of a corner, as opposed to simply letting the weight of their ideas carry the day, shows that they're out of gas. Out of ideas. Out of anything looking like intellectual integrity.

When Beck and others who try to paint Progressives as Liberal/Commie/Fascists who come for your liberty and your freedoms, this is who they fear. The following is their real boogeyman, because he represents all that the GOP can be, and should be, and idiots like themselves are too cowardly and intellectually bankrupt to strive for any longer...

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Oath Keepers

2010-03-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

While I have, I will admit, explored options in dumping my party affiliation, in light of the GOP's shenanigans as of late--looking at the Modern Whig Party as a possible alternative--and questioned the political process as a whole in the face of our Congresscritters patently going off the rails in droves, on both sides of the aisle, I can't say that I've thought about going so far as these folks.

I was in Maine when Clinton was in office, and the modern militias got a fair amount of press. I knew folks who were in one, and I have to admit, I was impressed by the refurbished tank that they trotted out on occasion for events. The guns were defunct, but with the know how to get the old Russian girl back up to snuff, I had little doubt that they could swap out functional weapons with little notice. Even still, most of folks involved were retired vets, and young men and women who they trained. In a similar fashion to a few skinhead groups that train up in the woods, though without the blaring music and probably 95% less race hating.

Justine Sharrock's article struck me, because the Oath Keepers are often serving members of our military. Their very name illustrates their love of nation, recalling Reza Aslan's words of Flag as totem. What I find interesting is that many were less concerned with a growing list of intrusions on privacy and other rights during the last Administration, and the Bush Administration's own recommendations for putting militia groups on higher watch status, than the current one.

Mind you, while racial politics does play into the equation a bit, I think that it has far less to do with the narrative that gets promoted. I have little doubt that the Oath Keepers would have congealed in the face of a Hillary Clinton Presidency--something that Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes wrote vociferously against during the run up to the election last year.

In the face of things, the Declaration of Orders We Will Not Obey is not entirely a bad thing. Rhodes is entirely correct that if the German military had refused orders, the Holocaust would not have happened. A principled military that refuses to march against its own citizens or deny them their rights is a key to preserving our republic. What is interesting is who ire is directed towards. The fear of the Fed coming down like a hammer is one that has been fostered for quite a while in the paranoiac fantasy life of the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Democrats have been cast as jack booted thugs and you have revisionists like Jonah Goldberg trying to cast the Commie-Pinko Liberals in the role of Fascists as well. It is an interesting mix of pejorative that are leveled against the Democrats--and as a former resident of Massachusetts and with friends in Chicago, I have seen and certainly know of Democrats who have borne their share of strong arm politics--but I am impressed that at the same time in trying to cast Democrats as New World Order--forgetting apparently who actually used the phrase to begin with--thugs, and limp wristed ineffectual elitist intellectuals without a shred of real world experience, that some sort of cognitive dissonance hasn't penetrated.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And on one level, I have to applaud the idea that it is the Constitution, stupid. The problem, unfortunately, with many of the grassroots movements, is that they are pointing their ire and anger and outrage perhaps in the wrong direction. Fear of the other, fear of losing ground, and stoked by pundits and politicians alike who increasingly cast their opponents as figures bent on destroying the fabric of America, we see the politics of fear warping legitimate concerns into armed camps and ratcheted up rhetoric that tend to ignore history. In casting Democrats--who, to be honest, I've yet to see much of anything as effective as the mythologized FEMA camps materialize--as despotic thugs, it robs our process of what we desperately need. Real debate. In the move for an all or nothing sort of politics, we not only rob ourselves of the opportunity for discussion and consensus, we push those who are most fearful and most vulnerable towards those who would use their fear against their opponents, and without care or responsibility for the fear and suffering that they engender.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Play Date

2010-03-04T09:23:00.000-05:00

I somehow survived the weekend trip to New York to visit my daughter, and the heaviest of snowfalls that Canandaguia has received this year. Not quite Snowmaggedon, but it was close.

Dug the ex-wife out of a driveway of the white stuff, got the snow blower out to take care of the drive so she could get some friends into the house for a while, and above all, got to hang out with the best kid in the world. Mine.

We did a lot this weekend. Got me acclimatized to her mother's birds: and African Grey with feather plucking issues, a pair of mated Cockatiels who she's rehabilitating, and a fairly sane and sweet little Cockatiel who hops on shoulders and then nuzzles. There were also several cats to be introduced to. And I got to see some of my old stuff again. OK, it was our stuff once upon a time, but Laura got our old bed, I was amazed at how comfy the old girl was when I found it in the guest room. Gabe challenged her old man to several games of Clue, only to discover that Daddy is a Zen Master at Clue, and when we got down to a three round butt whoopin' in the Conservatory, with the knife, and Mrs. Peacock off in chains, she decided it was time for a new game.

There was a fair amount of goofing around, but the highlight for me--beyond being able to make my girl breakfast--was the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester.

A museum for kids that encourages them to race around like wild monkeys and touch just about everything. How cool is that? Plenty to do, plenty to see, nooks and crannies filled with books and toys, and you can go there three days a week for a month and still find more neat stuff. Yes, the Hall of Fame is a little odd: ball is apparently in the Hall of Fame. Ball. The ball. Yes, I think they were trying too hard with that, but still, there are a ton of great old toys--my old GI Joes with the kung fu grip were in there. For the history buff, it's a great place to see the amusements of yore, and for kids, it's great to see that fun has a history.

If you get out to Rochester, and you've got a day to kill, I can't recommend the Museum of Play stronger. Though, I would watch out for the gift shop. Gabe discovered the very creepy fun of Stretchy Arms Gorilla and Squeezy Frog...

The Only Way to Win, Is Not to Play

2010-03-03T20:04:00.000-05:00

I took the weekend to skip off to New York to visit my little girl, and for the ride, I picked up a little light reading.

Reza Aslan's How To Win A Cosmic War asks fundamental questions on not just our own War on Terror, but at the success of globalization over secularism and nationalism, and the somewhat bitter fruit it has borne.

In particular, he traces the rise of Jihadists and compares their rise to the Christian Fundamentalists, Christian Nationalists, and Zionists. How Jihadism grew from fairly liberal religious nationalists in Egypt, and its eventual radicalization and exportation across the globe to a new transnationalist agenda. In part, because globalization has shown folks that even if they fail in effecting local change, that they can still have a great cause, and by framing it the context of Jihad, it is a grand site easier than the actual nitty gritty of running a state, and movement based on actually looking at issues that are often difficult, but lack the panache of tilting at the windmills of the West.

Out of an intellectual and political movement, Jihadists--and likewise Christian Fundamentalists--have learned to cut to the chase, and get to an easy to digest framework as a movement. Duty to God over nation.

Out of an intellectual movement based on effecting local change, the Jihadists--and others like our Christian Fundamentalists--frame perceived injustice with a great degree of sophistication. First identifying situations of injustice, assigning blame for those "responsible", and then connecting that injustice to a larger framework. Likewise, we see the deployment of aligning that framework to create "In" groups and "Out" groups to help identify their enemy, and then work to make bystanders sympathetic or antagonistic to these groups, compelling them to take sides, and thus open the doors not just for collective identity, but for collective action.

Convenient is that the rhetoric is similar and compatible for discussion across the globe, when you compare Jihadists, Christian Fundamentalists, and Zionists. America, we are not so oddly drawn into this, not just in our foreign policy, but by our own roots as a form of America as seen as a brand of Christian Zionism. Our own history is replete with imagery of an Exodus to the New World. From Reverend Edwards' "New Caanan" to Melville's "Israel of our time." And today, carried further by the likes of RJ Rushdoony's own visions of a Messianic America. We are, as Reza Aslan puts it, in the midst of "Patriotism as religious devotion. Flag as totem." And we have those who see the Constitution, not as the basis of our law and nation, but as Covenant with God and his new Chosen People.

Modern Evangelicsm, and its kissing cousin and paternal Fundamentalism came from a place where faith was under fire. From Darwin. Feminism. Scientific revolution. Literary criticism of the Bible itself, and the rise of a Christian liberalism that sought to reconcile tradition with social and scientific process, and the rise as well of modernization and growing secularism. The virulent Fundamentalism that grew from a backlash of these "threats" to God's America was toned down by folks like Billy Graham, whose brand of Evangelicism was far more inclusive and much less fiery, but still defined by a population that saw itself as under siege. And a trait that it shares with many Jihadists.

Evangelicals and Jihadists can trace their journey, and often prejudices, and feed one another. Many Evangelicals don't recognize Mormons or Catholics as Christians. Jihadists make declarations of takfir to declare other Muslims who disagree with them as infidels. Their own actions feed one another--with the infiltration during the last Administration of Evangelicals into the Air Force Academy, and US troops proselytizing in the course of their duties to a population under US guns, both the Jihadist and Evangelical agendas are advanced, and the feedback between the two--America and God under fire, as well as yet another Western Crusade against Islam.

Added into the mix, you have the Zionists who began their quest for a state late in the 19th Century. Sadly, there were people already living in that land, but that didn't stop a campaign to de-emphasize the ties to the land by many, and aggressive campaigns in both intellectual circles, and politically, to foment the idea of a paired religious nationalist movement to "recapture" the Holy Land. A vision that was both glorious as it was inventive, and based entirely on the idea of expropriating the natives from their property and land--and de-emphasizing the ties of nationhood of the Palestinian people. While Aslan attributes much credit to Theodor Herzl for the intellectual groundwork for the state, David Ben-Gurion cut to the chase in a letter to his son in 1937: "The Arabs will have to go."

Jewish nationalists began to frame their narrative. Palestinians weren't a distinct nationality nor people. Not a national identity, but part of a larger "Arab nation" and thus had no claim to the land.

The problem is, that this rhetoric has been a two edged sword. Not only have the Palestinians congealed now into a cohesive people, but it likewise has framed the conflict beyond just the confines of borders. And it likewise prompted an evolution of thought on the very nature of such conflicts, and paved the way for the transnationalist movements that now plague not just Israel, Afghanistan, Dubai, Chechnya and others, but also spurred nationalist movements of their own. Israel in many ways created a Palestinian identity in the face of denial of its very existence.

Further, it has become an emblem and totem for a new breed of Islamist, in the face of an enemy that cannot be easily defeated. Conflict now with not just Israel, but the US who backs her, and the fears of what globalization will mean to religion and states as the West's influence grows.

The radicalization has not just claimed lives in America or Europe, or Israel, but has killed far more Muslims as well. One tactic that the Jihadists have perfected not just a refutation of the admonitions against suicide in the Koran, as well as exhortations to not kill women, children, the elderly, or other Muslims. The practice of takfir--declaration of Muslims as infidels--has become a the best way to justify taking lives of their neighbors. They weren't really Muslims, so killing them is just.

Never mind that over 170 Imams and religious scholars declared a Fatwa denouncing the practice, and denying its validity. No Muslim can declare another apostate has been the finding, and oddly enough, Jihadist instantly declared all 170 of these clerics and religious scholars immediately infidels and in the pocket of the West...

Consider, that Bin Laden had no formal training as an Imam, or law or theology for that matter. The global Jihad is not just anti-intellectual but anti-institutional, and unable to compete intellectually, it finds it far easier to undercut and deny the authority of those who stand against them. In much the same fashion that many Christian Fundamentalists and Evanglicals deny the authority of a government, or fetishsize those in government who agree with their Messianic message.

And meanwhile, religious Zionists seek to use the strife that they, in part, helped to cause, to further call for more stripping of those from their lands--and use the very acts of defiance against their own actions as justification and the whole mess continues round and round, and round, and round, and round again. It isn't too far from the rise of nationalist movements in Britain as a reaction to a growing Muslim population in Europe and Great Britain. Cracking down on the Muslims only begets more strife, which feeds both the Jihadists from the rich ground of European born and bred Muslims, and their actions only feed these nationalists who wear their xenophobia as proud badges. The system gains energy from both sides egging one another on.

And that is really the question that Aslan raises: who do you fight a Cosmic War? How can you combat the rise of these groups who tangle not just with the secular governments that they are rejecting, but one another and see both as their enemy, and count on push back to feed their cycle and narrative?

The best way, is to not feed the cycle. Not to play the game...

Crossposted to The Motley Moose

Doubling Down?

2010-02-22T09:30:00.000-05:00

I am one of those folks who never really thought of Grover Norquist as being the face of evil. At least not evil in the Hellfire and Brimstone sense. And I don't think that Paul Krugman really think's he's evil either. But, Norquist and his ilk, despite having backed away from the deregulation fiasco--and none have yet acknowledged their policy advisements were in any way, shape, or form irresponsible or disastrous--do still represent a dire threat to our economic future.

He isn't evil. He's just educated beyond his means of comprehension. Which is true for a good many of the Ivory Tower Elite who make up the NeoConservative "movement." Impractical idealists who are insulated from the effects of the very policies that they endorse, and insulated from the people that these policies affect. He is "evil" only in the petty, mundane, and all too common variety of selfish arrogance that allows folks who have never really had to struggle or work for that matter, to figure that they've managed this because they're so much brighter than everyone, and then figure that they can experiment with peoples' lives.

Insulated and unaffected, they don't see real consequence to the policies that they've endorsed, and thus, they really can't see where these policies will lead us. It is all theory and idealism, and if they are evil, it is a petty, blind, and banal ignorance of cause of effect sort of evil. They aren't dumb, they're just not bright enough to connect their policies with effects on real human beings. Just numbers, just theories.

Which, indeed can bare a great deal of sorrow in the world, and that they are ignorant to consequences doesn't absolve them of responsibility, but I can't call them Evil. Just a lot dumber than advertised.

Even Grover Norquist has backed away from the policy suggestions he gave the last Administration in order to dull his visibility, because the sad thing is, I think that many are beginning to realize exactly how wrong they were, but their ego won't let them leave it alone. Instead, you've got AEI fellows advising the Tea Party, to give them further deniability.

And until we take their toys away from them, these Boy and Girl Children will play until they break the economy, and the nation. And it is up to us to strip them of their fictional raiment of "small government" and "personal responsibility" while at the same time driving up our budget for nearly a generation, and supporting policies that violate our privacy, and infringe on citizens' freedom of religion, and actively supporting policies that will bankrupt our childrens' futures.

Crossposted to The Motley Moose.

Zatoichi

2010-02-18T23:18:00.000-05:00

Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman has been taking up a fair amount of my time lately, thanks to Hulu.

I grew up on these movies. Shintaro Katsu made this role his own, and turned these movies into his own legacy. Blending chambara and Yakuza movies into a seamless and both touching and brutal whole.

The Blind Swordsman, or Ichi the Masseur, is a wandering gambler and sometimes masseur. A bakuto, a gangster and unlikely hero. He embodies much of what makes Yakuza film great. Ichi has accepted his role in life, but he does so with dignity, grace, and without compromise. He is both a figure of rebellion, and lynchpin of justice. Which makes him classic Yakuza film goodness.

Yet, the films are chock full of the chambara, or samurai film conventions too. Tales of honor, but seen through the eyes of a wandering gambler and rapscallion. An honorable gangster, Ichi gets into trouble, and fights his way out of it with a heavy heart. Not heavy for the fools who throw themselves at him, but for the waste of it all.

There is the heart of the Ichi films right there. Ichi desires only to gamble, and drink, and maybe enjoy the company of the odd good time girl who finds his blend of wry humor, and self deprecation to be sessy, and somehow, trouble finds him, and those who want to use his prodigious skills with the sword.

Shintaro Katsu played this role for years. 26 films in total. He pretty much owns the franchise. Played with a tenderness and often subtlety that Beat Takeshi's simply titled, Zatoichi, missed, it is a series of films, and even a television series that took the Blind Swordsman to adventures across Japan, and even to meet Yojimbo and the One Armed Swordman of the Shaw Brother's fame, I can't dislike the homage that Takeshi Kitano made in 2003. A big budget film, it still had the spirit of the Katsu films, of the reluctant swordsman, the gambler and wanderer.

And, to be entirely fair, Takeshi Kitano's film has one of the best dance scene end credits of any film that I know of.

And while Rutger Hauer may not have had Katsu's grace, I did like his Blind Fury.

If you get a chance, check out what Hulu has pulled together for a collection. They are a great series of films, and a great blend of styles, fun stories, touching performances, and a huge ball of fun and joy in film making. And check out Takeshi Kitano's homage when you get a chance too.

Me, I'm deep in The Tale of Zatoichi Contiues...