Xeno's Paradox

Not That Anyone Reads This To Whom It Would Matter, But...

2011-12-01T22:21:00.000-05:00

Dear U.S. Airways:

I am not a frequent flyer.

I used to be, when I was younger, but over the years, as security restrictions have gone from "mildly annoying" to "virtually impassable to someone with a metal plate in their leg who is unwilling to be x-rayed or groped," my travel habits have become less focused on air travel and more focused on alternative methods of transportation.

The cascading parade of fees your industry has, by and large, decided to use as a means of overcoming the need for an evolving business model have contributed as well; it wasn't that many years ago when I DIDN'T have to save money for months and make reservations a year in advance to ensure a successful vacation. (For anyone who didn't want to click, that's a fee hike for baggage in 2009, 2010, and 2011. And here's some more info, just for good measure.)

Honestly, the fees would be a mild annoyance if the level of service provided by the airline industry had risen along with the fees. Instead, you've cut back on meals on long flights; cut back on in-flight movies (which seems like it can't save THAT much money,) cut back on delivering luggage undamaged, cut back on allowable baggage; cut back on delivering luggage at all, cut back on seat size; cut back on travel privileges (and respect) for the disabled; cut back on airframe maintenance (which, frankly, is more worrying than any of the rest of it,) cut back on customer service...

But your airline in particular seems to have cut back on some things you really should have kept in service, if ever you had any; namely common sense and basic human decency.

Really, did a competitor leaving a particular market ACTUALLY justify a 600% increase in airfare?

You DO realize that if you're charging that high a price for a flight that is basically a puddlejump, Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, you're merely encouraging other airlines to undercut you? If Southwest Airlines has any sense (and unlike your management team their team has given us some solid indicators that they do,) they'll wait a year or so, let you kill air traffic between those two cities entirely, and then announce direct service between Philly and Steeltown at their customary, affordable rates... Thus displacing you from that market, possibly (and hopefully,) for good.

But that's a sign of MINOR stupidity on your part; that could just be some neck-bearded jerk with a misplaced decimal point.

Failing to give a refund on airfare to a terminally ill cancer patient, and offering to "compensate" by giving vouchers for DISCOUNTS to her surviving family, is the kind of galactic stupidity I typically associate with, well...

...Actually, now that I think about it, I can't think of another example in recent memory of anyone being that kind of dense, insensitive, obtuse stupid; and I applaud you for it. I didn't even realize you HAD a Research and Development department, and here you've surprised me by releasing into the wild, with so little fanfare, the very finest, lab-quality dumb, assembled in secret from the parts of lesser dumb.

Let's see if I can reconstruct it.

You force anyone who flies on your airline to accept that their tickets are non-refundable without paying an exorbitant and also non-refundable fee, which you disguise by calling it "trip insurance." This allows you to "be generous" with customers by giving them "just in this case" refunds when something unfortunate happens, despite the fact that their choice is often to eat the cost of the tickets or lose the option of flying at all, especially in markets where you are the only carrier.

You have a cancer patient who was cleared, and understandably bought celebratory tickets for an overseas vacation with her family, only to find out that her cancer has returned and this time will likely kill her.

You decide, inexplicably, to hide behind the flimsy cover provided by your internal policy which has neither legal backing nor logic, and refuse to refund her tickets under any circumstances.

You follow this up by offering the insulting "compromise" of giving the family members who will shortly be grieving for their lost loved one "vouchers," the effect of which will be a slight discount the next time they try to travel.

Somewhere, in all this, you conveniently forget that these days we have the Internet, where millions around the world, including all three of my readers, can find out about this kind of idiocy almost immediately, and vote with their wallets far more effectively than ever possible before.

So, that's the situation.

You have a policy of not refunding tickets, based on your claim that filling the planes is hard enough to begin with that you can't afford to have people cancel. Despite this, you routinely overbook flights and have to bump people who paid fair and square, and whose schedules depend on your ability to keep YOUR end of that bargain, because there are no seats left and you decided they weren't important enough. (Oh, and while I'm at it, you lie about it.)

You force people to accept this policy, the same way that software makers force you to agree to their licenses; if they buy tickets at all, they are legally agreeing that you have the right to do this.

Great.

Maybe that will keep you from getting sued.

But here's the thing.

I know you did this. And I'm telling all my friends.

They'll have to make up their own minds.

But you know what's really cool?

I get to make up mine, too.

And it is, thanks for asking.

I will never set foot in one of your planes again, ever. Even if you decide to take a public pose of magnanimity, and refund her the money so as to stem the damage to your brand image, it is too late; your excuses are not convincing me.

You have lost, forever, any business I might have given you.

If one of your planes is the solitary mechanical means of getting to my intended destination, I will damn well hike.

Because if you value your customers so little that you're willing to not only refuse to help, but toss in additional insulting gestures at, a customer who is facing their own impending death and presumably has enough on their plate without your malicious screwing around, you don't deserve my money, and I will do absolutely everything I can to assist my friends in finding other means of transportation to absolutely anywhere they want to go.

I may be a single customer.

And you may find us personally and individually relatively meaningless.

But I hope you quickly reap the inevitable rewards of treating us, to our faces, as though we are meaningless to you and your business.

You act as though we're inconsequential, irrelevant to your business, which operates on some kind of divine mandate and exists as it does despite us, because it has some kind of right to exist?

Then you're welcome to test your theory by trying it without us.

Thank you for your time.

A Sordid Tale Of Epic Personal Failure: The Saga Continues!

2011-11-16T21:00:00.000-05:00

You may recall from my previus article the really nice couple having a really (inexplicably) difficult time getting their TV replaced.

Things have only progressed in the same vein thus far.

After the cataclysmically awful series of events that happened Sunday night, I got to work Tuesday with some degree of apprehension; after all, what else could go wrong?

...Boy, did I ever find out.

I looked on the computer to find their order; no problem, the cancellation request went through and their money has been refunded.

Awesome!

So I call them up, explain that it's been credited back to their card...

...And she tells me that she lost the card while shopping on Monday and called to cancel it.

No sweat, it'll go back to your checking...

...It's a prepaid debit card. No checking attached.

That thumping sound you're hearing is my forehead hitting the desk repeatedly.

So she asks me when I work this week, so they can come in as soon as they get their new card from the issuing bank.

I click on the icon to check my schedule...

And the computer crashes!

You just can't make this shit up, I tell you.

So, I guesstimated - correctly, as it turns out, and took action to make sure that the inventory problem with the TV was in fact fixed.

Oooooooook.

Cut to Wednesday.

They came in.

I almost hid under the counter.

But, ok, I promised them a resolution, and dammit, I'm going to give it to them.

So, we check the website. Lo and behold, the credit sent to their debit card was only $22 - the rest went to the gift card we gave them the first time. So that's good; but the $22 went into some kind of limbo, because their bank refused the credit from the refund to the canceled debit card.

So I called the website people.

They told me that the $22 was just "out there, somewhere." They couldn't get it back, and it would have to wait for the bank to sort itself back out.

Now, I am alllll about the customer service, so I patiently explained to the rep that these customers have been waiting for us to get this sorted out for FOUR DAYS, and could we just order the TV, price override it to the amount on the gift card, and ship it to them so they'd be happy and not think we're completely incompetent tool sheds?

No.

That was the entirety of the answer: no.

At this point, I was more than a bit exercised with the website. I got a front-end person to come back, and we gave them a gift card for the $22 - flat-out gave it to them - so that we could get this resolved.

Go to the site, amazingly enough, the website still hasn't updated to reflect the fact that we still don't have this TV in inventory; we are still only given the option to give it to them from local inventory.

I call the website again.

"OMGWTF, fix it!"

And they said, "Yeah, maybe Saturday it'll be updated."

...

Words failed me.

I literally sat there for at least ten seconds making incoherent noises at the rep on the phone.

Then I began from the beginning and explained the whole story to her, again, and asked, very politely - never a good sign with me, as that, rather than vitriol, is usually the sign of an impending disaster of legendary proportions - if we couldn't possibly hurry that right along.

Nope. Saturday is the earliest they can have it updated.

So I hung up on her, turned to my customers, and begged them to let me order it to be sent to one of the other nearby store locations so they could pick it up.

And they told me, "Not a chance. We're sticking with you, after the amount of work you've put into this. Saturday it is."

Is anyone going to think less of me if I'm in Timbucktu when Saturday rolls around? I'm serious, this is like some kind of terrifying voodoo curse.

Ranting, Vitriol, A History Lesson, And Economic Theorizing

2011-08-09T22:32:00.000-04:00

So, like the proverbial thief in the night, I steal onto the scene with yet another installment of (quite lengthy) ranting and vitriol.

You guys may be wondering where I've been, and I will gladly explain.

Just before the 2010 Congressional election, some few of you may remember my saying that the election wouldn't be the saving grace everyone expected. The left wing was all set for their majority to remain intact, and that wasn't going to happen; the right was all ready for their team to storm into the Congress like gangbusters and fix all that ails our beleaguered country in one terrifying, awesome stroke of conservative policy, and that wasn't going to happen either.

You may recall; what I said was that the Republicans would win the election in a landslide... and then proceed to business as usual, which would be a dagger in the heart of the nation.

Sadly, as you may recall from past predictions, I am not often wrong about these things, and this is one of those times.

You ever have a time when you didn't WANT to be right?

That.

So, as I have watched, jaw agape, expression of shock, horror, and despair firmly plastered on my face, our Congressional leadership thundered into the halls of power with a vast mandate from the people, and did...

...Well, nothing, really.

As I expected, they've spent ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of their time in office thus far on things that don't, and shouldn't, matter; gay marriage, again. Abortion, again.

For FUCK'S SAKE.

Really?

Where I've been is too fucking bummed out by our current government to make myself blather about it; I'm only posting tonight because my girlfriend and a couple of my buddies pestered me relentlessly to see what I'd say about recent events.

So, ok.

We hit a golden opportunity; a place and time where events conspired to allow Congressional Republicans and TEA Party members to ACTUALLY DO what they were elected for; reign in spending, massively, and thereby cut the debt and the deficit.

See, the federal government hit the debt ceiling.

Wait, wait, back up.

It occurs to me that as is so often the case, many of you might not know - even if, having watched the nightly news, you think you do - what exactly all this brouhaha was actually about.

So, let me back up to the beginning of things, and explain.

See, we owe a shitload of money, as a nation. (Don't worry, I will get into detail later.)

But since we spend like addicts, and we are hooked on Failurenomics, the federal government ends up blowing all the money it takes in in actual revenues like Gary Busey and Charlie Sheen on a weekend bender, and then in order to keep paying for things, we have to borrow more money.

What the debt ceiling is, really, is a statutory - note that word - limit on how much outstanding debt the United States can hold at one time; in other words, we took out all the payday loans we could, and Crazy Eddie's Fast Cash Express cut us off.

No more, you're done, turn in your chips and back away from the gaming table.

THAT was the opportunity.

See, in order for the government to remain in operation, it had to be able to continue to borrow money...

Wait, wait.

Back up some more.

Why the hell did we hit the HIGHEST AMOUNT OF DEBT WE'RE ALLOWED BY LAW TO HOLD in the first place?

Well, that one's easy; we've been doing it routinely for essentially the entire history of our nation.

See, the Founders were bright guys, but in their day, spending more than you bring in was considered so obviously poor business sense that they didn't see a need to put a requirement for a balanced budget into the Constitution; "Surely," said they, "no-one would be dumb enough to destroy a nation because they couldn't add."

...Or words to that effect, anyway.

Knowing what I do of Ben Franklin, my guess is probably fairly close.

At any rate, they didn't put in a limit on spending in the Constitution, and as a result, our government has spent more than it earned throughout basically its entire history.

Periodically, the Congress has quietly gotten together and raised the limit on outstanding debt, so that there wouldn't be any disruptions to the average citizen, and importantly, they've only once made any serious provision to pay any of it back.

There are payments here and there, but never a serious attempt to actually reduce the country's debt burden in a meaningful way, by paying any of our actual creditors OFF.

The thing is, this wasn't actually a problem until recent years; the amount of debt our nation carried, until the 70's - the long national nightmare that was the Carter administration - was small enough to be easily manageable within our budget.

To see what I mean, let's go back in history.

The first reported annual debt figure for the federal government was in 1791; we owed a bit over $75 million.

That pesky war.

So, by 1800, we were at about $82 million; Jefferson cut the budget, cut taxes, and somehow managed to reduce it far enough that by the second year of James Madison's presidency, we only owed $53 million.

Monroe, however, somehow managed to contrive a debt of $91 million by 1820, and somehow managed to get himself re-elected. (WTF?)

John Quincy Adams didn't do much better, and was in fact accused of "public plunder" by his opponent in the 1828 election, Andrew Jackson, who evidently wasn't kidding, as he managed to bring the debt down to $48 million - a reduction of almost half - by 1830.

Martin Van Buren, Jackson's VP and protege, was the unfortunate inheritor of a massive market crash; 1837 saw businesses and banks alike go away. Van Buren's response was to slash government expenditures so severely that he managed to get the debt down to $3 million.

Of course, he was pilloried for the measures he took to get us there, despite his ideas' success in maintaining our national solvency, and he was booted out on his ear.

The next decade was bad. William Henry Harrison turned into the first President to die in office in 1841, leaving the presidency to John Tyler, who managed, well, not much. Polk and Taylor managed to drive us back up to the $60 million range by 1850, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan held the line, keeping the debt level to 1860, and then came Lincoln.

The Civil War and the Reconstruction really put us in a bad way; $2 BILLION in 1870. The thing is, it stabilized; from 1870 to 1910, the national debt stayed right around $2 billion.

Then came Woodrow Wilson, and the seeds of our current problem were sowed. Wilson brought the debt up so much that it was almost comical; $25 billion by 1920, and along the way passed the Federal Reserve Act.

Don't worry, we'll come back to that.

Calvin Coolidge, a few years later, slashed taxes and tried to clean things up, bringing us down to $16 billion by 1930.

Then came the Second World War and Korea. Spending for those battles was, to put it mildly, astonishing; leaving us at $257 billion in debt by 1950, and $290 billion by 1960.

The 60's, for all that people blathered about how much Vietnam cost, weren't too bad as far as the debt; the main cost of Vietnam was human and psychological. By 1970, the national debt was $389 billion.

Then, somewhere along the way, we elected Jimmy Carter. Remember me saying something about him?

By 1980, the national debt had almost tripled, to $903 billion.

Damn.

But at that point, you see, the sinister fruit of the Federal Reserve Act were coming ripe; by 1990, the debt was $3.2 trillion; in 2000, $5 trillion; and then...

Well, Bush brought us up to $10 trillion, and now Obama's gotten us up to over $14 trillion.

Bad.

But you may be wondering why I blame Wilson and the Federal Reserve for all this mess.

Well, it's because a huge chunk of the national debt is FUCKING FICTION.

Long-assed history lesson, which most of you probably didn't need, to get to a certain point. Notice how the debt started taking off into the stratosphere after the Wilson administration, and never looked back?

It's because of the Federal Reserve.

See, previously, the Department of the Treasury was responsible for printing money.

But after the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Reserve Bank took over that function.

So, if Treasury doesn't print the money, how do they get it?

Well, they BORROW IT, AT INTEREST, FROM THE FEDERAL FUCKING RESERVE.

That's right, one part of our government - despite the transparent legal fiction, anyone who thinks the Fed isn't part of the government in PRACTICE is sadly mistaken - loans the rest of the government money every year, at interest.

Then loans it more money, at interest, to make the interest payments on the money the government borrowed last year.

Anyone see how this might, say, spiral out of control?

This, in case anyone was aware of it, was the core of Congressman Ron Paul's idea for reducing the national debt; do away with the fiction that the Fed is an independent entity, and simply erase the portion of the national debt that is owed to ourselves.

It's as though my left hand loaned my right hand a dollar out of my wallet and then demanded a dollar ten back.

...Errrr?

Ron Paul's idea wouldn't work, for a very simple reason; the Fed carries the interest payments as part of its asset sheet. Simply erasing the debt owed internally would cause all kinds of financial fits and convulsions, which would be bad.

But stopping all interest charges on future transfers of money to the Treasury? Ah, now that's the ticket; the government would continue paying the previously accrued interest payments, and over time, the amount of the debt would actually decrease.

You may be wondering about China, and how dem dam furriners is buyin' 'murca.

And therefore you may be surprised to know that it's not quite as represented.

Hong Kong owns $139 billion in U.S. securities.

An association of Caribbean banks holds $147 billion.

Brazil holds $185 billion.

OPEC holds $210 billion.

Insurance companies hold $261 billion.

American banks hold $270 billion.

England holds $511 billion.

State and local (domestic) governments hold another $511 billion.

Mutual funds hold $638 billion.

Pension funds hold $706 billion.

Japan holds $877 billion.

China holds $896 billion.

Private investors and investment firms hold $1.46 trillion.

...And the Fed holds over $5 trillion dollars of U.S. debt.

If we refused interest charges on future Fed checks, the savings from the interest charges alone would pay off Japan and China in about 4 years.

So, everybody lay off with the terror about foreign investments, hmmm? The Fed holds more U.S. debt than all foreign investors combined. (Total for the top 7 foreign investors? $2.96 trillion.)

So, now we come to it.

We hit the debt ceiling.

The White House screamed that senior citizens were going to get screwed out of their Social Security checks.

Nobody screamed that Congress would lose THEIR paychecks, of course.

But after several weeks of increasingly frantic rhetoric to inflame the public with terror about the consequences of hitting the debt ceiling without raising it yet again, the White House had backed itself into a corner.

ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of what the Republicans and TEA Partiers had to do to accomplish real, meaningful, lasting change in our government's spending habits was...

...Not cut a deal.

See, the President told the world that the sky would fall and the rivers would turn to blood if we didn't reach an agreement; having said that, he had no choice but to act as though he was, at least sort of, telling the truth, and the debt ceiling "crisis" was of such magnitude and importance that the left would bargain away anything in order to prevent that kind of collapse.

All the Republicans had to do was present a massive package of entitlement cuts, then stick their fingers in their ears and shout "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" until Obama signed it. That's it, that's all, tag it and bag it.

And they caved.

Instead of making a "deal" that would actually address the problem, they lost their nerve, and signed a deal that doesn't make anybody happy; it doesn't raise taxes, but it doesn't cut spending either. It doesn't require a balanced budget amendment, one thing we cryingly, desperately need, but instead requires a vote on whether or not they should have one.

And while they're at it, provides the federal government with an additional trillion dollars or so in "borrowing power" - read, spending power - PER YEAR, until fiscal year 2021.

Which will make the federal budget higher than the GDP.

They really don't want you to actually read this bill, guys. Good thing I'm here for that.

The real danger to our economy isn't the debt.

The real danger to our economy is the persistent, endless grind to spend more than we earn.

We had our national credit rating downgraded, not for obstructionism, as some in the media would have you believe, but because having reviewed the debt deal that was passed, S&P - the ratings agency - determined that it did essentially nothing to address the actual causes of our financial instability, namely, our out-of-control entitlement spending. As such, they downgraded us, because they don't see a way we can recover our economy as long as people on welfare have tattoos, cigarettes, beer, nice cars, laptops, and big screen TVs, while the people actually earning money and paying taxes have none.

...Or at least a lot less of it.

If you think I'm kidding, I'd like to point out to you that Social Security and Medicare alone constitute more than half our annual federal spending; anyone who tries to snow you with bullshit about how the War on Terror has cost us the house and the farm is simply lying to you. The total cost of the War on Terror to date, all ten years of it, including all theaters of combat, materials, payroll, and support for the soldiers after they come back home, is less than $2 trillion - in other words, less than what Social Security and Medicare spend in a SINGLE YEAR.

See, fixing the economy isn't complex. They want you to believe it is, because if you believe that it is some kind of sinister wizardry that only the designated acolytes can truly understand, you'll be more likely to go along with their bullshit.

But in fact, the problem isn't complexity; it's lack of national will.

Fixing the economy is simple. It's just PAINFUL.

In order to fix our economy, we'd have to take measures to drastically reduce welfare; drastically reduce government funds for healthcare, including repealing Obamacare; gradually phase out Social Security; means-test the shit out of anything where someone wants a fucking handout; cut capital gains, cut the gas taxes, and institute some new trade laws.

Really, really painful trade laws. (Which I absolutely promise to address in an additional article sometime in the next two weeks.)

We'd go through maybe 5 really, really bad years.

And then, like a sword blade, refolded in the fire again and again until the edge is a million layers of fuck you all ready for battle, we'd emerge from the fire lean, mean, and ready to compete against the countries that HAVE a national will.

But we'll never do it.

And by our failure of will, we've made things so very much worse.

(I am posting this now, so you guys can read it; I will be making the text pretty and adding supporting linkage tomorrow, but tonight it's 3 AM and I'm done typing. If you read this and are interested in my sources, check back tomorrow late in the day and I should have it all linked up.)

It's Finally Happened!

2011-06-15T22:27:00.000-04:00

I never thought this day would come.

No, I mean it, NEVER.

Some few of you may remember an article I posted about three years ago talking about the long, strange saga of Duke Nukem Forever.

Some of you may be wondering what the hell I am blathering on about now.

So, ok, recap. (I was going to say "short" recap, but when I wrote it I realized it really wasn't. At all.)

Long ago, there was a game. It was called Duke Nukem.

It featured a loud, sarcastic, misogynistic, overly-testosteroned hero who smoked cigars and openly skirt-chased, facing off against aliens invading earth "to steal our chicks."

It was stupid, but a lot of fun.

A couple of years went by, and they released a (vastly superior) sequel, named Duke Nukem 3D, conveniently enough because it was, errr, 3D. Or, you know, that weird gaming pseudo-3D that isn't but tries really hard.

Even louder, even funnier, even more misogynistic, and you had pipe bombs.

It wasn't a flagship franchise, you know; not like Doom or Deus Ex or Call of Duty, but it was fun.

So, a couple of years went by, and the developer, 3DRealms, proudly announced another sequel: Duke Nukem Forever.

They posted trailers.

They - apparently - spent their entire budget on hookers and blow. Of both kinds.

They made a trailer that actually - at the time - looked promising, and got investors to give them another huge wad of money, which they, again, spent on hookers and blow.

Ok, fair's fair, I don't actually know that for sure, but considering their total lack of production of anything, it's as reasonable as the next guy's guess.

At any rate, years crawled by. Increasingly hostile interviews were granted, in which the developers, like some kind of sinister mantra, chanted to gaming reporters that DNF would be in stores "when it's done."

Which begged the question, "what's the holdup?"

And that question was asked.

Over and over.

For 14 years.

Read that again.

For 14 years, 3DRealms teased the gradually decreasing numbers of fans with cryptic trailers, ads, and again, promises that the game would hit stores as soon as it was done.

And they went bankrupt.

...Shit.

But Take Two Interactive, the parent company, had finally had enough. They were determined to get a game out the door if they had to use Semtex and Czech detonators.

So they got together with Gearbox, a company renowned for producing...

...errr...

...Other shooter games you most likely also haven't heard of. Like Borderlands, Brothers In Arms, all the expansion packs for the first Half-Life game, and Aliens: Colonial Marines.

And after Gearbox had been working on it for less than 9 months, we got a new trailer.

And everyone who still cared saw the headline: New DNF Trailer! and groaned, collectively, with a massive sense that the tease would never end, and we'd go to our graves never seeing this game, but always eternally hopeful.

Then they watched the trailer. And it was...

It was...

Duke.

Just as screwy, just as lewd, just as completely lacking in class, manners, or anything approaching basic human decency.

Just as... funny.

And with irony.

"But what about the game, Duke, is it any good?"

"Yeah, but after twelve fucking years, it should be."

The two or three people that still cared noticed a few things; new graphics engine, what looks like actual gameplay...

...Does this mean there's actually a GAME?

FUCK YES, it does.

Duke Nukem renounced his seemingly eternal title as King Of Vaporware on Tuesday.

I'm not going to say there was rejoicing; frankly, after a total of 15 years (announced in 1997,) the game would have to be better than the Second Coming of Christ, and the EULA on the box would have to cure pancreatic cancer while giving you a blowjob and simultaneously baking you a cake to make it worth the wait.

But Gearbox "took over and continued" development as of August last year - and in less than 12 months, they produced SOMETHING.

I don't know if it's any good. I haven't played it yet. The reviews are less than stellar, although frankly, I'm not sure how much of that is fairly directed at the game itself and how much is directed at 3DRealms for wasting 15 fucking years of our time waiting.

But you know what?

I'm going to find a way to buy it. Probably a year from now, and probably after everyone has stopped giving a damn entirely; but I'm going to buy it.

And I'll bet that two things will happen: I'll bet I will play the hell out of it - and I'll bet I laugh my ass off.

Always bet on Duke.

More Recipes, Just Because I Can

2011-06-14T20:14:00.000-04:00

So, as a habit, on my days off, I typically make dinner, so that Kelli doesn't have to.

However, because of our work schedules, and thus our uncoordinated grocery shopping, the things I find in the kitchen to work with can be a tad eclectic, and as a result I tend to experiment.

I am, I freely admit, much less successful in that regard than Kelli is; she's one of the best cooks I've ever met.

But every once in a while, I have one pop up that works. This week, I am pleased to report that I came up with two very different dishes, both of which were, to my taste, wildly successful.

Obviously, your mileage may vary.

I will also note that Kelli tends to think I overspice things; I am a fan of bold flavor combinations, and will tend to err on the side of putting a little extra, rather than leaving something bland.

So, yeah.

Bearing that complaint in mind, here are two recipes for you: Lemon-melt Tilapia, and Bacon-Wrapped Chicken.

The second one is serious, no-holds-barred heart attack food; bear that in mind.

For the Lemon-melt Tilapia, you will need:

A pie pan or small baking dish

3-4 tilapia filets

shredded asadero cheese

grated parmesan cheese

paprika

basil

lemon pepper

ginger

2 tablespoons of butter

one-half of one of those yellow plastic squeezy lemon juice things.

Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. Arrange the filets in the pan so that they overlap as little as possible; you will need the space to turn them later.

In a microwaveable cup, melt the butter.

Once the butter is melted, stir in the lemon juice, then pour the mixture over the top of the filets. Dust the filets lightly with the basil, paprika, ginger, lemon pepper, and then top with a heavy dusting of parmesan cheese.

Put the pan in the oven for ten minutes.

After ten minutes, remove the pan from the oven and flip the filets as carefully as possible, using a spatula. Tilapia is a delicate fish, and will already be almost fully cooked; the filets WILL fall apart if you're not careful.

Spoon a little of the lemon-butter mixture over the tops of the filets, then dust the tops of the filets the same way you did the other sides. Once you're done, top each filet with enough of the asadero cheese to make a solid top once the cheese melts.

Put the pan back in the oven for another five minutes or until the cheese melts completely; don't overcook this, though. I always seem to warn about this with tilapia, but it bears repeating.

Now some of you may be thinking that the cheese is a weird combination with the lemon, but it turned out to have a very nice flavor contrast, and the cheese kept the moisture from escaping the tilapia, thus letting it stay moist, light, and flaky.

Pull it out and plate it up, preferably with a light salad or some kind of steamed vegetables. There's no need to pour the lemon-butter over it after it's finished cooking; the flavors will have absorbed nicely, and moving the filets without a lot of sauce will keep the fat content down.

Enjoy!~

...And now I'm straight out going to blow a gasket off your heart, and your mindhole, all at once.

For the second recipe you will need:

5-6 good sized boneless chicken tenderloins

a package of thick-cut bacon (Yeah, a PACKAGE.)

1/4 stick of butter cut into pats

1/4 stick of butter that's just a lump

basil

marjoram

paprika

ginger

white pepper

garlic powder

onion powder

1/2 cup feta cheese

1/3 cup heavy cream

2/3 cup sour cream (And for the LOVE OF GOD, use Daisy brand)

1/2 cup shredded mozzarella or ricotta cheese

Yeahhhhhh... That's a lot of cholesterol. Get your Lipitor ready.

Pre-heat your oven to 350.

Cut each of the chicken tenderloins in quarters, halved lengthwise and then crosswise, so that each becomes four small strips of chicken. Set them aside for now.

On your cutting board, lay out your bacon in strips, then cut them in half crosswise, leaving two smaller strips each.

Dust the upper side of each strip with basil, marjoram, paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, and ginger.

One at a time, roll one strip of chicken up in each bacon strip, then place each wrapped chicken strip in a baking pan so that the overlap in the bacon is down. The spices should be INSIDE when you wrap the chicken.

Once all your chicken is in the pan, place the pats of butter throughout the pan so that they're distributed fairly evenly, and dust the tops of the chicken lightly with the white pepper.

Put the pan in the oven for 25 minutes.

While that's cooking, take the remaining 1/4 stick of butter, the cream, sour cream, feta cheese, and mozzarella and mix it together in a microwaveable bowl; nuke it for 90 seconds, stir, and then nuke 30 seconds and stir repeatedly until the mixture is smooth. The feta cheese doesn't melt well, and there may be a few lumps; this is fine.

Once the 25 minutes are up, pull the pan out, and spoon the cheese sauce over the chicken, making sure each is evenly covered, then return the pan to the oven for an additional ten minutes.

Once it's done, pull it out and enjoy! If you have a lot of people, this makes a great appetizer. It is, obviously, VERY rich, and I don't recommend it as a main dish; you'll have some kind of episode and fall down.

But damn, it's yummy.

Dave's Useful, Life-Changing Infographics, Part 1: The 4-Way Stop

2011-05-16T21:36:00.000-04:00

To start things off with some entertainment, I'm going to deliver a lesson in how 4-way stops are intended to work.

Some of you already know this.

As is clear from driving in many states, some of you don't.

So: four cars approach a 4-way stop at about the same time, as shown via cheap-assed Paint illustration below.

Now, all four cars intend to proceed directly across the intersection. This shouldn't be overly challenging, but for some reason it seems to totally violate people's ability to spatially reason.

So, this is how it's intended to work. The two cars on opposing sides go, at the same time, across the intersection.

This is NOT how to do it. One car goes, while the car opposite remains in place.

Here we are again doing this correctly. Now that the first pair of cars have already crossed the intersection, the second pair of cars proceeds to do the same.

...And here we are again doing it wrong; now that the first car has crossed, the second car counter-clockwise goes across, leaving two cars remaining.

As you can see, if the cars cross in pairs, the fourth step of this exercise is that no cars remain; the intersection is clear and all four drivers are already on their merry way.

As you can see here, however, if we were to go about it the other way, by the time the third car enters the intersection, not only the fourth car remains at the intersection, but additional cars are pulling up to stop; this is clearly going to take all day. Don't do this; this is incorrect and makes you look like a tool.

Things go to a whole different level of hellish stupidity if someone has to turn left, as witness below:

As you can see here, two of the cars pulling up this time are trying to turn left.

Now, doing this correctly, the car going straight GOES STRAIGHT, and the car opposite that's turning left turns BEHIND the car going straight. This way, both cars go at once, clear the intersection nearly simultaneously, and everything goes fine.

On the other hand, the car turning left could turn in FRONT of the car trying to go straight, thus causing that car to stop in the middle of the intersection and making everyone wait. This would be stupid, but I see this happen all the time.

Now, the sane drivers repeat the example of the previous sane drivers; the car going straight does so, and the car turning left turns behind that car, so that the intersection is clear.

On the other hand our lunatics from the previous wrong example are really screwed now; the cars waiting to go east and west are obstructed by the car going south, who had to wait (if you recall) for the idiot going north who cut across in front of him.

Now, if this process is done correctly, look! The intersection is clear and everyone has gone on their merry way.

On the other hand, the drivers from the other example have had an accident, because they're retards who cannot correctly operate a 4-way stop, and as a result, cars are stacking up in every lane while they wait for the accident to be cleared.

Don't be that guy.

Operation of a 4-way stop is a simple operation whose fine details seem to elude many of us. Hopefully this simple lesson has cleared the confusion and will spread virally throughout my personal set of globe-spanning intartubes to the point that they improve awareness of this issue and improve driving conditions for us all.

Just wait, this series gets better.

Inaugurating A New Series...

2011-05-16T21:30:00.000-04:00

Because it's been a while (and I do mean a WHILE,) I've decided to improve the world by offering, over the next few entries, a series of informative and helpful infographics to assist people in understanding things. The first couple will be fairly simplistic, but as I add to the series they will grow more complex as I tackle more complex subjects.

I may even have to add a Xenodoesmath tag at some point.

So, bear with me. I'm working out frustrations and simultaneously hoping to entertain and inform.

A Political Metarant

2011-02-26T20:30:00.000-05:00

Obligatory shocking "headline" opening sentence!

Minor historical rewind to explain unnecessary background information...

Anecdotal evidence that the philosophically opposing political party is undesirable, interspersed with ad hominem attacks and vague allegations of sexual deviance from the statistical norm.

Continued anecdotal evidence, unsupported by facts.

More ad hominem attacks in a larger, italicized font!

Specific complaint against the current legislative agenda of the opposing political group, sparsely populated by links purporting to support an argument when in fact there is neither argument nor supporting evidence for said argument.

Allegations of parliamentary procedure being used for ridiculous shenanigans by said opposing party, conveniently ignoring the fact that the author's own political party engaged in similar (or identical) shenanigans when in a similar position in terms of occupancy of the legislative body when divided by party affiliation.

Denigrating statements about the individual legislative members of the opposing party and their alleged deviant sexual escapades, this time involving members of lower animal strata.

Infuriated ad hominem attacks in an even larger intalicized font!

Rambling historical cherry-picking, ignoring the antics of the author's own party in favor of the antics of the opposing party even when the antics of the author's own party are equally if not more damaging.

Allegations that the opposing political party cannot understand basic arithmetic, much less economic theory; expanded into...

EVEN ANGRIER ALL CAPITALIZED AD HOMINEM ATTACKS IN THE LARGEST ITALICIZED FONT OF ALL!!

Gradual introduction of heavily biased conclusion predicated upon evidence never actually presented, as though it supported an argument lacking even basic logical coherence.

Final angry statement discussing the inherent obviousness of the author's chosen position and accusing any dissenters of said opinion of lacking basic upper brain function, in a large italicized font but this time with lots of exclamation points for unnecessary emphasis!!!!!!!!

Rhetorical call to arms, demanding action on the part of the readers, who by this point are surely disillusioned as to the very possibility of the opposing political party's possession of positive motives, and instructing the readers to support the author's chosen political cause of the day!

Snappy quote from a movie to round things out!

...You're welcome.

And While I'm At It For Tonight...

2011-02-17T20:12:00.000-05:00

Sublimnal advertising.

Think it doesn't exist?

Disney sure does. Think I'm kidding?

Think again.

Sometimes I really, really wish I was.

"Nice Government You Got There. Shame If Something Happened To It."

2011-02-17T16:31:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, it's been a while.

And thus, I feel it's an appropriate time for an angry rant. (And, I will note, I have family members who will be directly and personally affected by this; this may increase my ire a bit.)

But because it's me, I have to deluge you with facts and such while I do so.

Brace yourselves.

The events in Wisconsin are demonstrating the exact reason that public sector employee unions are frightful and wrong.

Wait, wait, back up.

First, a tiny, shiny history lesson.

See, back in the day, the unions came about as a direct result of working conditions in this country; at the time they served a purpose, because they protected workers against actual injustice.

Once upon a time, there were what they called "factory towns."

You've no doubt heard the term.

Well, the term comes from what was at one time in the past a common practice. Companies - usually at that time owned by single individuals - would buy land and build a factory. Because they were pursuing the best deals possible on land, the factory sites were typically far out in rural areas.

Because they were far away from any of the places workers were, and the transportation methods available today didn't then exist, in order to have a workforce, the factory had to provide infrastructure.

So what they did was build houses and neighborhoods around the factory. Build a store. Build a school. Build a hospital.

But all those things were owned by the factory owners.

So workers would come for the job; move their families into the houses and schools; buy their furniture and clothes, as well as food, at the store; plow their wages from the factory back into the owner's pockets, even if by an indirect route.

But once there, they were stuck for good. They'd signed a mortgage, you see, and they couldn't get out of it. If they got into trouble at work, they could find themselves evicted, their children expelled from schools, their loans called in, be denied health care, be denied groceries, and - most importantly - unable to move somewhere else and find another job.

The company stores were DELIGHTED to extend lines of credit to workers who hit a rough patch; it gave the factories, and their owners, even more leverage and control over their workers.

The formation of the unions allowed the workers to demand fair treatment; the owners couldn't screw their workers like they used to, or they wouldn't HAVE any workers.

But those conditions no longer obtain.

See, Best Buy doesn't also own your house.

Target doesn't have the power to deny you groceries.

Kmart can't get your kids expelled from school.

And you have cars and public transportation. If you really, really feel like you're getting screwed at work, you can go down the road a block or so and find work somewhere else.

So the CURRENT unions are NOT THE SAME AS the unions of the past.

The current unions, on the other hand, do a lot of things; it's just that "helping" the workers is low on the list.

For example, at most union workplaces, you MUST belong to the union to keep your job.

You are REQUIRED to pay union dues.

You are heavily encouraged to buy ONLY union-produced goods. (Don't worry, they hand out flyers so you know which businesses are "acceptable" for you to buy from. And each union has a convenient web list.)

And while making the union officers rich - off the union dues - there are sure a lot of union dues left in the coffers.

Right; fine; so where do they go?

Well, they go to pay for Democrats to get elected, mostly. In the 2010 election cycle, the unions as a whole donated $62,249,282 to political campaigns.

Of that, 93%, $58,121,960 went to Democrats.

But, well, that's just one election, so it's not as important, right?

So, let's see a trend here. Since 1990, the major unions have donated a total of $486,440,870 to Democratic candidates. Oh, and $27,886,800 to Republicans.

To put this another way, they gave Democrats 17 and a half (17.443) times as much money as they gave Republicans.

Regardless of the political viewpoints of their members.

Who had no control over that expenditure at all.

And what do the Democrats do?

Why, pass union-friendly legislation, of course!

So.

There are distinctions between public - and private - sector unions, though; several minor ones, and two major ones. First, private sector unions draw their wages from for-profit corporations. Public sector unions, however, draw their wages - and thus their union dues - from taxpayer dollars. When a private-sector union pays for Democrats, they do so with the dues paid by the revenue from people - customers - who chose whether or not they would frequent that business. Public sector unions, on the other hand, are spending tax dollars - which you have no choice BUT to pay - to support politicians and legislation which increase the benefits and power of people working at a business that you have no choice BUT to frequent.

Second, private - sector unions, at their worst, can cripple a single business, which simply results in customers choosing a competitor.

Let's take a minute and fantasize about a future in which Best Buy, for example, is unionized. And they get in a contract dispute with the union. The union stages a strike.

You can still get your TV at Target or Wal-Mart.

Now imagine a postal workers' strike.

YOU HAVE NO CHOICE, BY LAW, BUT TO GET YOUR MAIL DELIVERED BY THE U. S. POSTAL SERVICE.

No other carrier is allowed to carry first-class mail; if the postal workers strike, all mail STOPS.

You have no choice but to allow the police to apprehend criminals and deter crime; attempting to do so yourself is "usurping the rights and prerogatives of government" and sends you to jail.

So if the police strike, you are defenseless.

If firemen strike, your home can burn down with no alternatives and no way to stop it.

The second important difference between a public and private sector union is that public sector unions can blackmail the society itself, with the threat of the cessation of vital social services.

Nobody dies if Best Buy can't sell TVs for a day.

But people sure die when cops and firemen strike.

Now, the events in Wisconsin are soon to be mirrored across the country; there's no financial way to avoid it.

The public sector employees' unions, who have for years lobbied and campaigned heavily for ever greater increases in their benefits, pensions, and compensation, have - are - and will threaten to disrupt the function of society itself to protect their "right" to threaten the function of society.

The function of a union is organized blackmail. "Do it our way, or we will shut down your business."

That in and of itself is wrong. Each worker has a right - and as an adult human being, a moral obligation - to make their own decision as to whether their working conditions are acceptable to them or not; if those conditions are not acceptable, each individual worker has a right to leave. There are other jobs. (Just because you don't want to do the kind of jobs illegal immigrants typically perform doesn't mean there aren't any jobs. Your job squeamishness is a choice.)

But blackmailing a company is morally wrong.

It is acceptable, marginally, given that customers of those businesses - who actually and ultimately pay the union workers' wages - have a right to go somewhere else. They aren't required to buy from a particular store; if they don't like the behavior of a union, they can simply refuse to buy products or services from that union.

So it is much worse when the people doing the blackmail are being paid by the people they are threatening. Public sector unions are paid by tax dollars. Let us be clear here: public sector union employees are NOT taxpayers. Claiming that they are is a manipulation.

When your wages are drawn from the public purse, monies you "pay in taxes" are returning to the public purse; no more, no less.

To use the apt phrasing I will openly steal from one of my Facebook friends, "Having them pay taxes is just a shell game. They didn't generate anything, ALL of their income has come off the back of those in the private sector. Saying they pay taxes is like me giving you $5.00 so you can buy a $5.00 sandwich from ME."

But since you are bound by law to use the services of the government - there are no private-sector police, no private-sector fire companies, no private-sector postal carriers - this is a question of morality.

See, for a prison guard's union to threaten to strike and LEAVE NO GUARDS ON THE PRISONS if we - the taxpayers - don't give them more money, is the direct moral and logical equivalent of saying, to a private citizen, "give me your wallet or I will rape and shoot your wife."

It really IS that simple.

Public sector employees' unions should not exist. Period, dot, over. Full stop.

You have a choice as to whether you enter government service. No-one comes to your house with a clipboard and tells you that you will become a policeman, firefighter, public school teacher, postal carrier, or DMV clerk, or you will report to the reclamation chamber for terminal processing; you choose that as a career.

And you do not have a right to "serve the public" by extorting money from that public, with the threat of the destruction of the social fabric, denial of essential (and MANDATORY, lest we forget) services, and possibly injury or death.

Such a "right" cannot exist.

Wisconsin's governor has put a bill (annoying, slow .pdf that is the bill text) in motion that will, among other things, severely reduce the so-called "collective bargaining rights" of the state employees' unions. In other words, to limit their power to do just that.

In more detail, the bill will require state employees to pay HALF the national average private sector contribution towards their own health care; the national average private sector contribution of 5.8% towards their pensions, and eliminate their ability to use "collective bargaining" to set their own benefits. They would retain the ability to collectively bargain over their base pay.

In response, the unions have threatened to walk out; no schools, no cops, no prison guards.

The bill hasn't passed yet. Why? Because rather than vote against the bill, the Democrat members of the state legislature have hidden in the hills, so there won't be enough members for a quorum to vote at all. (Where, might I add, they are still getting paid, even though the Wisconsin State Police are after them.)

What you have here is, under a weak economy and in terrible circumstances that we all are suffering with, people who are paid BY US, who are ostensibly working FOR US, whose benefits in many cases exceed ours by a LOT, threatening to let murderers and rapists into the streets to roam free if we don't do what they want.

Good luck to the media in trying to portray Governor Walker as the villain here. (Oh, and don't worry, they're trying.)

Their logic - or at least the logic of the arguments they're using - is so full of holes it looks like a Swiss cheese factory exploded into a colander.

Picture that.

Haha.

Governor Walker said "it's a tough time, and we're all going to have to tighten our belts a little, even you guys who work for the state."

And the state workers are responding with, well, the title of this article.

Fire 'em all.

There are loads of unemployed people who would be grateful for the jobs, and any state employees who walk out if that bill passes should be barred forever from future employment under our government.

I am infuriated over this; my future brother-in-law is directly affected, as he is a Wisconsin prison guard - who had NO CHOICE but to join the union. He will be the first to go in any layoff, and either way this goes, he will be the one paying the price here.

Jon, if you read this, for what it's worth, I'm on your side, even if I totally disagree with the circumstances of your employment. If there's anything I can do to help, say the word and I'm there.

Now, Since Some Of You Might Have Missed This...

2010-12-13T19:47:00.000-05:00

... I present to you the collapse of the Metrodome, courtesy of YouTube.

And, because I'm such a sweet guy, here's what my parking lot looked like on Saturday.

The temperature right now here is 1.

Tonight it'll get down to -16.

Yeah, cold.

But my parking lot and the Metrodome are direct results of 17 inches of global warming being dropped on us in one day.

Also, the fact that the Metrodome was designed by people who forgot they were in Minnesota.

Really, guys?

Really?

You're in Minnesota, you can't design a roof capable of handling fucking SNOW?!

They spent $68 million dollars on...

...WAIT a second, I'm forgetting to calculate for inflation!

They spent $181 million dollars on a stadium in Minnesota whose roof can't actually handle the quantities of snow we're getting in Minnesota now that the global warming is getting REALLY bad.

Go figure.

For the record, this weekend's Snowpocalypse was the fifth worst blizzard here ever.

So can someone chime in to explain to me how Saturday was the snowiest December day in Minnesota history because the global mean temperature is getting higher?

The Top Five Things In An Airport Guaranteed To Set Off Alarms And Result In Enhanced Patdowns

2010-12-12T19:41:00.000-05:00

#5: Change and keys. Empty your pockets, dumbass.

#4: Jokes about Islam or explosives. Just stop talking until you're on the plane. Actually, it's probably wise to shut the fuck up until you reach your destination so the rest of us don't have to listen to your bullshit.

#3: 85-year-old women with walkers. Because they're clearly terrorists.

#2: Hot girls. Face it, ladies, if you're gorgeous, you can count on a "screener" groping your goodies.

Aaaaaaand the number one thing guaranteed to set off alarms and result in enhanced patdowns:

#1: Reading and understanding the Fourth Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment, in its entirety, follows.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

In other words, naked body scanners and enhanced patdowns are illegal. Period. You have a right to be secure in your person and your effects. They can't search you or your damn luggage without a search warrant for that based on direct suspicion that you have done or are doing something wrong, and that warrant has to describe exactly what they want to search, and what they think they're going to find.

Period fucking dot.

Benjamin Franklin said that those of us willing to trade essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither.

He wasn't wrong.

But anybody who thinks the TSA is doing a fine ol' job IS wrong. There are a LOT of other ways to resolve the security issue that don't involve sexually assaulting our citizens and violating the Constitution.

Thank you for listening.

As Per Request...

2010-11-14T19:01:00.000-05:00

I was griping the other day about entitlements. For example, Social Security.

Kelli, ever my lovely devil's advocate, pointed out that people have been pumping money into good ol' Soc-Sec for years, and it wouldn't be fair just to do away with it and leave them in the lurch, and asked "how would you even go about getting rid of it?"

Well, let me tell you.

First, let's get out of our heads entirely the notion that Social Security is a "right." You don't have a right to have the government guarantee your retirement, especially given the way Soc-Sec actually works.

See, you contribute to the program throughout your working life in the form of an inescapable, unavoidable, mandatory, no-opt-out tax.

Then, when you get old enough, the government gives you way more money back than you ever put in, unless you are staggeringly wealthy.

How does it perform this miracle?

Easy. It's a Ponzi scheme. The people putting in money now, are paying not for their own retirements, but those of the people currently drawing funds from Soc-Sec. When they retire, they will be paid for by the succeeding generation of workers.

In theory.

Of course, since there are now more people retired than working, that's getting to be an ever bigger drain on the treasury.

Funny, the way the government is fine to do this, but regular citizens get chucked in jail for trying it, isn't it?

To put things in perspective, Soc-Sec is as big a proportion of the federal budget as defense - all of it - is. As big a portion as Medicare and Medicaid combined. (We'll get to those in another article, real soon.)

To put it further in perspective, Social Security costs us over 700 billion dollars a year.

That's a lot.

That's so much "a lot," that a single year of Social Security, plus a single year of Medicaid, pays for the entire Global War On Terror combined so far.

So when people whine about how much the GWOT has cost us, I sag, and sigh, and go "here we go again..."

See, Social Security was supposed to be temporary. Back when it was enacted, in response to the Great Depression One, it was touted as a means of providing people who had been hard-hit by the Depression with a safety net to get them through until the crisis was over.

Of course, like all other "for the duration of the crisis" laws, somehow they never got around to repealing it, and it became a permanent fixture in our political landscape.

But there's still no Constitutional authority for it, and there's no "right" involved; you, as an individual, have no right to a penny of any money earned by someone else, and pennies earned by other people provide far and away the greatest portion of any money you'll ever receive from Soc-Sec.

So it should go away.

Especially since our newly elected crop of idiots (who replace other idiots, who were elected to get the newly elected crop of idiots out of the offices they held before the 2008 elections, to which they had been elected to get rid of the previous set of idiots, who all got re-elected in 2008 - the circle of life) has decided to take all entitlement spending, namely Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, off the table for budget cuts.

Great idea; same one we've had before. Cut taxes, yay! Spend just as much money as before, boo!

Fucking morons.

Not them, us. For electing these idiots again, to replace those idiots we had just elected. Again.

At any rate, if Social Security were entirely eliminated, that would be, well, $700 billion removed from the federal budget.

Of course, it would also be removed from revenues as well.

That would be a catastrophe; just look at the rhetoric surrounding the Bush tax cuts and their potential renewal. "Would cost $1 trillion dollars!"

"Cost" ?!

You keep using that word.

I do not think it means what you think it means.

See, "cost" is when you have to spend money for something.

When a tax cut happens, it didn't "cost" anything. The government just didn't take as much money it has no right to, as it did before.

That's your money. Not theirs. The government - contrary to what Mr. Obama appears to believe - doesn't have a right to any of it. Period. So you not paying them can't "cost" anything.

All it means is that they have less of your money to spend. That's not a cost.

What it IS, however, is economic stimulus - you can spend that money somewhere else, thus stimulating economic activity.

Admittedly, it does mean the government has less of your money to spend, which means that they have to cut spending.

Balancing a checkbook isn't THAT hard, you guys; we all have to do it every day.

Well, some of us it's more like every month, but still.

There's no good reason the government should be free to ignore economic realities its citizens have to cope with on a daily basis, namely that you cannot spend money you don't have, plain and simple.

So.

Let's get to the meat of the issue; how do you eliminate a program that every taxpayer contributes to, thus allowing them to instead keep their own money and stimulate the holy hell out of the economy at the same time?

In a nutshell, stop making them pay in.

There's no realistic way to eliminate the program without some uncomfortable belt-tightening in Washington.

So, what we do is this:

Graduatedly reduce contributions to the program by the age of the contributors.

Say, next year, new workers holding their first jobs will no longer have to contribute anything.

The longer the worker has been contributing to the program, the bigger their estimated payouts are, but never to exceed the amount they directly contributed to the program.

Now, instead of cutting off the folks already riding the program, cut salaries for all members of Congress in half, and let their salaries make up the remainder of the payments for the people currently taking payments from Soc-Sec, until all of those people, well, die.

At which time Congressional salaries remain halved for good.

At retirement age, all workers now contributing to the program receive either an annuity, or a lump sum payment, at their option, in - note this - UNTAXABLE funds, equal to the total dollar value of their lifetime contributions.

Once all workers currently contributing have retired, the program ceases to exist, other than to administer the payouts of any annuities opted for; once those annuities end, the program is just gone.

Meantime, the workers who began working after the cutoff date have kept more of their salaries all of their working lives, and neither contributed a dime to, nor have any ability to expect a dime from, the Social Security program.

Now, people are stupid. I know potting soil smarter than most of the people I am actually personally acquainted with; it grows plants, and stuff.

So people wouldn't plan for their retirements.

And I'm not totally deaf to the notion that some kind of retirement package could be put together.

As such, I have an idea.

Gather round, listen closely. I expect you to tell me if this is bullshit or not after.

First, while the government could easily oversee management of the funds themselves, they should have neither control of, nor access to, those funds.

Second, most people who are currently working HAVE some kind of retirement package already, but there are problems.

What I propose is to eliminate some of those problems.

See, back in the day when people typically worked for one company all their working life and retired on an in-house pension from that company, the 401(k) plan was a great idea.

But nowadays, people change jobs much more frequently, and often the retirement plans of previous employers simply become lost, remaining forever with the banks that employer chose to administer those plans.

So.

Instead of the current system, I propose this.

Convert the ubiquitous Social Security number into an account number.

That account is a 401(k), with two significant changes.

First, that because all funds in it are contributed from after-tax income, payments from it are considered after-tax income automatically whenever they are disbursed.

Second, that when you change employers, your new employer simply uses your Soc-Sec number to disburse any matching funds they contribute towards your retirement into that account; but they have no control over, or access to, those funds either.

What this creates is a private, portable retirement for everyone. When you change jobs, you don't have to fill out reams of paperwork or worry if your funds are vested; employer contributions become a part of your account when they're added, and belong to you from that day forward, even if you change jobs.

Kinda like having Gmail; you don't actually care what internet provider you're using, because your email stays with you, thus preventing you from losing all your old correspondence from your ISP-given email address when you change ISPs unless you perform a series of acrobatic monkey tricks to keep it.

You could even call it...

...Social Security.

But when you retire, the funds you'd be receiving would be a combination of your own wages, as chosen by you, and the contributions of your employer - in other words, one hundred percent your own money, without stealing from anyone.

Plus, without the huge drain of the Social Security tax on your paycheck, you'd first have more money to contribute to your retirement, and second, have more to spend.

I submit to you that while the banks would scream, this would stimulate the economy a treat.

(More on ways to fix the economy right up in a follow-on article. Tuesday night, I promise, right hand up to God.)

Things That Go THUMP! In The Night. Also, "That Door Closed By Itself!"

2010-11-14T17:20:00.000-05:00

Yes, finally I'm getting around to reviewing it.

Back up a bit.

A few weeks ago, I got invited to go to the midnight premiere of Paranormal Activity 2.

Of course I said yes; I loved the first one.

So, let me first give you my impressions of some of the things that really, really worked.

PA2 gave a far more plausible reason for there to be cameras all over the house than the first movie did, and as such manages to convey greater sincerity. Also, rather than using the annoying Blair Witch - style shaky-cam technique, the cameras are set up in fixed locations, which the movie simply shuttles between. It's marvelously effective, as it lends a sort of detached, impartial air to the events, which makes it feel oddly more authentic; there aren't any real "why doesn't that douchebag put down the camera" moments, as there have been in several other movies I can think of.

Yes, I'm looking at you, Cloverfield.

As well, the fact that there are multiple cameras allows the tension in the movie to build very slowly and subtly, something missing in the first film. This is something that I am going to come back to, however, because the critics absolutely hated it, and I will address their objections later on.

One trick of sound that the film does that is equally subtle but marvelously effective is the use of a precursor; when something significant is about to happen, the soundtrack develops a slow, gradually increasing, very unsettling bass rumble, right on the verge of hearing; almost subsonic. It is at first undetectable, then grows until...

...Something happens.

Another thing they did well is that in several critical scenes, the actors and actresses weren't told what was going to happen (from what I understand,) which means that, although they knew SOMEthing was going to happen, whenever the supernatural activity actually occurs, they ACTUALLY react to it. It makes their responses far more genuine, and that authenticity translates to the audience with the greatest of ease.

As well, the events of the second film surround and encompass the events of the first film, thus both expanding on and enriching the "lore," while simultaneously giving retroactive enjoyment when you spot something that fed an event in the first film, or was caused by it. This - at least for me - increased my enjoyment of the first film as well, and was hellaciously effective.

Now for some things that either got hammered by critics, or that I didn't think worked.

The critics absolutely HATED the pacing. I didn't agree at all. I will explain.

In the first half of the film, nothing - or nothing immediately apparent as supernatural - happens. Most of the first half is spent with many, many repetitions of shifts between various camera angles around the house displaying absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

This is a VERY slow lead-in.

The critics hated this, and I got the impression from most of the critical reviews I've read that if they hadn't had to stick around, most of them would simply have walked out before anything really disturbing even happened.

Their loss.

That much-derided slow buildup lends even greater weight and shock value to the events in the second half of the film; as they are such an extreme contrast to the first half of the film, both in pacing and in succession.

The result is that the last 20 minutes of this movie is like getting kicked in the kidneys with terror over and over again. By the time things have progressed into really overt supernatural events, the sense to the audience is that of total inescapability; this family is doomed, no matter what they try to do to protect themselves.

Watching that doom unfold is both terrifying and as fascinating as video of an earthquake.

I honestly didn't like some things about this movie; I felt there were several opportunities they didn't really take advantage of. (Most of which would come under the heading of "spoilers," though.)

For example, I felt that the housekeeper was underused; as was the dog. I will note that the dog is some kind of mutant acting genius, and did a great job, although I'm sure my praise would be somewhat meaningless to the individual in question.

Annoyingly, this suffered somewhat from a syndrome that is becoming more obvious and noticeable as the studios go to ever-greater extremes to try to build buzz before filming is even complete, namely that the trailers featured several tiny clips that weren't actually in the theatrical release, which is slightly jarring for the audience, as you're looking for the bits you saw in the trailer...

...and not finding them.

Which in the case of PA2 is more significant than it might be in many movies, since what really sells this movie is the immersion; the audience gets involved in this movie. A couple of the bump-in-the-night bits serve only to underscore the authenticity of the actors' responses, and by the time the film heads into its climax, the audience is screaming every 30 seconds.

I will make a side note here.

Avatar cost roughly $400 million to make. Granted Pocahontas In Space is a good movie, and granted $1 billion is a hell of a box office, but PA2, by comparison, cost $3 million, and made $40 million plus opening weekend.

That's not a billion dollars, sure, but it IS roughly a 1200% profit margin.

I wonder which film will have a sequel next year?

Now, aside from the technical merits of the film, let me say this.

This was the scariest movie I've seen in years and years. The actors may not be recognizable, "name" actors, but they did a fine job selling their characters, and as a result, the movie is creepy to a fantastic degree. If you're not a horror fan, or didn't like the first one, you probably won't like this one either.

But if you're a horror fan, this movie is awesome.

Go see it in a theater, or go to your buddy's house that has the big screen and the home theater setup. The sound makes the movie, and it's very much worth it.

Dinner Time Again

2010-11-14T17:05:00.000-05:00

Getting myself in the mood for an opinion blog after so long without, frankly, writing anything required a bit of fortification.

Accordingly, here's what I made for dinner. (This is two recipes, separated, although I admit I made them more or less simultaneously.)

You will need:

4 oz. cooked crab meat (real, thank you.)

8 oz. crumbled feta cheese

4 oz. cubed cream cheese

4 tbsp. butter

1/2 tsp. paprika

1/2 tsp. onion powder

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1/4 tsp. black pepper

1 package medium mushrooms

Pre-heat your oven to 375.

Combine the butter and cheeses in a bowl. Microwave for 1 minute, then stir. Repeat until the cheese are smoothly melted and stir in the crab and spices. Microwave for 1 more minute, stir.

Rinse the mushrooms, then remove the stems. Lightly saute the mushroom caps with a little olive oil until they start to soften. Place the mushroom caps, hollow side up, in a small baking dish; fill with the crab and cheese mixture. Place dish in the oven and bake for 10 minutes, or until the mushrooms are browning nicely.

Remove, and serve. The remaining crab and cheese mixture can be served on crackers if you MUST.

Second...

Leave the oven on 375.

You will need:

4 medium-sized chicken breast fillets.

1 stick butter

1/4 cup Southern Comfort

1/4 cup Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum

1/3 cup sweetened lime juice

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup heavy cream

Melt the butter in a medium sauce pan. Once it's melted, stir in the Southern Comfort, Captain Morgan's, and lime juice slowly, ensuring that it is mixing evenly. Continue to stir until the sauce starts to bubble, stir in the brown sugar, and mix until it is fully dissolved, then stir in the heavy cream. Simmer for 3 minutes, then remove from heat.

Place the chicken in a small casserole dish and pour the sauce over it. Bake at 375 for 35 minutes or until the chicken is fully cooked, turning the chicken over every 10 minutes.

This can be served with the remaining sauce poured over it.

For the record, I loved both dishes. Kelli was somewhat disappointed, as she doesn't like crab, mushrooms, or "anything with liquor in it."

So your mileage may vary.

Because I've Been Absent For A While...

2010-11-12T15:59:00.000-05:00

...I thought I'd share with you - prior to my I PROMISE RIGHT HAND UP TO GOD post Sunday night - this little visual treat. Think Black Hawk Down style alien invasion movie, and bask in the glory that is Battle: Los Angeles.

Battle Los Angeles Trailer
Uploaded by teasertrailer. - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

Red Rover...

2010-10-30T01:11:00.000-04:00

The door is open

The Absolute Mystery That Is Woman

2010-10-18T19:23:00.000-04:00

Or rather, women.

But let's be more specific.

The real mystery is CONSERVATIVE women.

Why are there so damn many of them?

I mean, we want them, we approve of them, they're great, and all, but...

Let me back up a bit.

I will say, starting out, that I am personally hard to pigeonhole politically. This is because I try (granted, I don't always succeed, but I TRY,) to follow the ideas and theories I believe to be correct to their logical conclusions, and make my decisions based on whether or not I would want to live in the resulting world.

This may not be the best way to make decisions, but it's the one I've got.

Ayn Rand once said (loosely quoted,) that if you reach a contradiction, you should check your premises, because one of them is wrong.

Yeah, that.

So.

The political positions I espouse are usually not those of the masses, largely because I find overall that the moral premises from which I make my decisions invalidate AT LEAST SOME of the platform of each of the major political parties.

Like the Constitution Party... "small government, low taxes, less government interference, individual liberty, freedom, respect for and tolerance of others, God hates fags."

You had me going for a minute there, chief, but it kinda fell apart at the end.

I would say something about the Greens, but having read their platform I gather their basic idea is that we should all be living in mud huts (but getting along with everyone, which from history didn't happen even when we DID all live in mud huts,) and hoping an asteroid doesn't hit us anytime soon.

There are the Republicans: "small, limited government, low taxes, less government interference, individual liberty, freedom, we can spend all we want, God hates fags, the government has a right to tell you who you can and cannot marry."

There are the Democrats: "big, annoying government, high taxes, we can spend all we want, individual liberties as long as the government says you can have them, gay marriage is fine, we like to kill babies."

Who VOTES for ANY of these fuckers?

So we're starting to, as a nation, gradually figure out that the political parties don't actually represent anyone but the political parties themselves, and more specifically the nepotistic budding hereditary aristocracy our Congress is rapidly turning itself into, which means that as a movement, we're starting to see more and more people trying to figure out their OWN political philosophies, rather than signing on with the team that's least annoying to them.

I so want to say this is a good thing, but seeing as our education system as a whole has totally destroyed the education of millions (we rank behind the Czech Republic, people. That's just sad,) and we are a nation of ignorant, frightened sheeple, letting them wander around like the stunned, headless automata they truly are is probably a bad thing.

Just look at Massachusetts.

But all that notwithstanding, we have some die-hard faithful, on both sides.

The die-hard Republicans think the die-hard Democrats have blinders on and are burying their heads in the sand to avoid the realization of just how badly their ideas have failed when they were tried.

The die-hard Democrats seem to think that anyone who agrees with the other team is actually crazy, and they are mystified by how anyone can possibly believe such crazy things as "I want the government to leave me the fuck alone" and "my goddamn taxes are too high, you thieves."

Which brings me, like the circle of life, back to my title.

See, women are a mystery to the Left, even those of the Left who are also female, because they keep on doing batshit crazy things like joining the Tea Party or the Republican Party, and since women aren't crazy and those things are crazy, the people doing them aren't women.

Or at least that seems to be the thrust of their thinking.

The numbers of women in both the Tea Party and the Republican Party are growing steadily, as are the numbers of everyone else in the country; right now, the Democrats have alienated just about everyone, and thus the ranks of the Right are swelling across all demographics.

That said, the people who seem to be traumatizing the Left the most is the women. For some reason they are totally unable to envision a woman actually thinking that keeping babies alive is ok; they can't envision a woman thinking that success can be defined in a traditional gender role; they can't envision a woman thinking that just maybe she doesn't really want to climb the corporate ladder, working 80 hours a week, to get a corner office and a middle management job; and they can't envision a woman who DOES climb the corporate ladder, busting her ass along the way, who isn't also a rank-and-file leftist.

This mystification extends so far that they actually have been known to say that women who aren't leftists aren't really women; that conservative females are unable to think for themselves; that women cannot be both feminist and conservative because the two words together are an oxymoron; that right-wing political candidates who are female aren't there on their own merits, but merely as a sinister machination on the part of the chauvinist right-wing reactionary overlords; that women who don't vote Democrat are betraying feminism; that women who don't believe in on-demand abortions have been brainwashed; that any real woman has to vote Democrat; that any woman who doesn't vote Democrat is an Uncle Tom, or rather an Aunt Jemima...

...OK, I made that last one up, but it fits in well, wouldn't you say?

...Oh, wait, no I didn't; that's what they said about Dr. Condolleeza Rice.

See, the problem the Left has is that they really believe that they are right. Not just right but Right; theirs is the only view that matters, because theirs is the correct one, and anyone who disagrees is so obviously insane that their opinion doesn't matter.

And therefore, women who don't vote Democrat aren't women.

Which is why they are now unable to understand why so many women aren't voting Democrat.

See, in lib-land, women are unable to think for themselves.

You know it's true, because when women DO think for themselves, they get accused of everything under the sun including not actually being women.

Because part of thinking for yourself, you see, is the possibility that I might not agree with you.

Which means SOME women who think for themselves are going to disagree, no matter what your position.

Which means if you think they can't both disagree and still be female, then you believe women are unable to think for themselves.

And yet the Democrats are the party which loudly trumpets about women's rights.

Let me ask you this.

If women are in fact, as the Democrats seem to think, sort of a warm-blooded houseplant with genitals, then why are they bleating about rights for them at all? If they're non-sentient, they don't need rights.

Only sentient beings - those able to think for themselves - need rights, or can take advantage of them; which means that liberals are in a Catch-22 of their own making; either women can think, which means they need rights but might disagree, or they can't think, which means they all vote Democrat like the soulless robots they clearly are but have no need for niceties like malls because they only like what you tell them to like anyway, and you can just tell them to like living in mud huts (oops, sorry, Greens again,) wearing fresh animal skins and chewing roots with their teeth to make stew.

I guess basically what I'm getting at here is that Carly Fiorina, Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and all the other women entering politics on the Right, and those voting on the Right, are a giant stick in the eye of the clowns who've co-opted feminism, and regardless of whether or not I agree with the political stances of those women individually, I cheer wholeheartedly for what they represent...

...The idea that women can think for themselves just fine, thanks - even if the process by which they do so is occasionally a little strange to me - and are partners in life, not cargo to be carried along to some imagined goal line.

You Dems ought to be ashamed.

A Tale Of Woe, Agony, And Disappointment

2010-10-05T21:20:00.000-04:00

So today, my coworker ________ from Giant_Retailer_00, comes in looking tragic.

I want to make this clear; she didn't look tragic because of her clothing, or her grooming; no, she looked like someone had just kicked her puppy.

Hard.

Now, this particular individual is someone I like fairly well, although she seems (based on her reaction anytime I talk to her) to think I am basically made from some kind of horrifying mixture of toxic waste and flaming weasels with anthrax, but since I am the Kinder, Gentler Dave, I tried carefully to stay out of her way and not say anything.

I couldn't avoid overhearing her complaining about something.

I was going to say something about her new haircut, which looked good, but decided that I didn't really want to get the "how-soon-can-I-scrape-this-off-my-shoe" look again, and thought better of it.

But after a while, I realized that what I was overhearing in bits and pieces, while she complained to other coworkers, was a tearful rant about...

...Her new haircut.

...Wait, what?

What's wrong with it?

So, unable to restrain myself anymore, I asked.

After the expected glare, I was informed that she went and got a haircut, and it was so awful that she cried all the way home, and it looks terrible, and...

...Errr...

Ok, for background, I would expect that as a totally normal response to a haircut IF the girl in question had had waist-length hair that was suddenly cut to her shoulders; that's commonly traumatic, and so totally understandable.

Well.

Ok, understandable to the extent that my plumbing kit allows.

Anyway.

In this case, however, while I grant that her hair was SOME longer before, and SOME shorter after, it wasn't the kind of disastrous cut that makes bystanders cringe, children cry, and dogs bark furiously.

"Um... What's wrong with it?"

Now, this is an honest question. I thought it looked cute; fit her features well, all that. So I was totally mystified by the drama surrounding it.

I was, however, totally unsurprised to receive another glare and a disdainful snort.

Well, fine; I accept that I am a guy, and therefore totally unequipped for subtlety, and incapable of telling good from bad, or having any fashion sense whatsoever, but this still doesn't answer my question...

..."What's wrong with it?"

Apparently, her hairdresser - or, I suppose, ex-hairdresser, given that she referred to the offender as "that awful bitch" several times - attacked her with a chainsaw followed by a bath of rabid pitbulls.

So, yeah.

I give.

I am too much of a guy to grasp what the flaw was in it.

For the record, I thought it looked good.

But *shrug* yet another reason to file away to not comment, mention, discuss, or even look at women's hair, until they indicate - usually by insults - that they wanted you to compliment them on it.

*Sigh.*

Returning, As Is Only To Be Expected, With An Angry Rant.

2010-10-04T01:41:00.000-04:00

...But first, a video!

Right.

All that STUFF.

All that extremist, nut-job STUFF.

That, ladies and gentlemen - although perhaps I do myself too great a service in assuming there will be more than one of each kind - is Representative Jan Schakowsky.

She represents Illinois' 9th Congressional District.

To give you a good starting place, before I start swearing, this, folks, is the 9th Congressional District for the state of Illinois:

Gee, that looks perfectly natural, and not at all gerrymandered, doesn't it?

For those of you who may be wondering, "gerrymandering" is the process by which electoral districts are drawn specifically to encompass specific groups of people in the hopes that those districts can then perpetually be relied upon to vote for whoever did the gerrymandering in the first place.

Considering Illinois' 9th District has not only elected Ms. Schakowsky six times, but in fact has elected Democrats in every election since 1949, it must be working.

Since 1949.

The last Republican elected from the 9th District was Robert Twyman, in 1947. Then the 9th was gerrymandered, with what seems to be the greatest possible success, and has stayed so solidly Democratic since then that it voted over 65% for the Democrat for President each of the last 3 times.

So, map notwithstanding, what's IN the 9th District?

Evanston: median income $69K. (11.1% below poverty.)

Skokie: median income: $57K. (5.4% below poverty.)

Morton Grove: median income: $72K. (2.7% below poverty.)

Park Ridge: median income: $110K. (2.2% below poverty.)

Norridge: median income: $57K. (3.9% below poverty.)

Lincolnwood: median income: $83K. (2.9% below poverty.)

By contrast, let's see how Minneapolis-St. Paul (home to 6 of the Top Ten Places To Live In America this year, thanks look:

Minneapolis: median income: $44K. (21.5% below poverty.)

St. Paul: median income: $48K. (15.6% below poverty.)

So, Ms. Schakowsky represents a carefully chosen selection of people who make more money, and have fewer poor, than "the most literate city in America," a place that - between the Twin Cities - contributes over 68% of the total economy of the state of Minnesota, who vote for Democrats every time, reliably as clockwork.

And yet the REPUBLICANS are "always for the rich?"

You lie through your teeth like that, lady, they're going to turn black and fall out, and you'll have only your own tongue to blame.

I haven't touched on the cutesie nickname she uses for anyone who thinks that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution is actually important, "tenthers."

Guess what.

I'm a "tenther."

I think I'm going to get a fucking T-shirt made.

Because the founding principle upon which our government was built, the idea that government should be the servant of the people, not their master, is not "old stuff."

It's not "stuff."

It's the soul of our nation, and it's how we got so big and cool in the first place.

Ms. Schakowsky clearly not only doesn't care about that notion, but knows full and well that her constituents don't either; after all, THEY won't be affected by her disastrous political and social positions; they're rich.

Of course, the nicely poetic irony here is that when society collapses under the weight of the burdens the chosen and duly elected representative of the 9th District has helped impose on it, the residents of that 9th District will be among the most ill-equipped to survive the ensuing anarchy. How many Democrats do you know with any actual survival skills?

I can survive if you drop me naked in the woods with no clue where I am and no tools.

Of course, if you do that, I will walk out of the woods at SOME point later on and stick a handmade spear between your ribs because dropping me naked in the woods is a really good way to piss me off at you.

But that's not the point. (The point has to be held parallel to the ground, you know, for humans; they walk upright, so their ribs are sideways. For deer, the flat side of the blade should be perpendicular to the ground.)

Don't let me get sidetracked with minutiae, here.

Ms. Schakowsky has the most liberal voting record in Congress.

She represents a district richer - and more yellow-dog Democrat (I'd vote fer a yella dawg if it ran ez a Democrat!) - than the nation as a whole, but also more of both than the Twin Cities, a carefully manufactured voting district narrowly engineered to select particular communities so they could, all as a group, vote for Jan Schakowsky.

She considers our Constitution "stuff," and refers to those who support it as extremists.

You clowns in the 9th, you're getting what you pay for.

I wish you the joy of it; when you discover the inevitable results of your purchase, you will find none, to be sure.

But it occurs to me that the 9th District does NOT contain the "most literate city in America."

And therefore it dawns upon me that I should use smaller words.

Anyone who holds an elected office in this nation who displays this kind of cavalier disdain for the founding principles of our government is publicly admitting that they are a traitor; to this nation, to its principles, to the oaths they swore upon assuming office to protect America from the very things they're doing now, to its most fundamental laws.

Under the new laws our lovely pet Obama has spawned for dealing with terror suspects, a traitor can be shot.

Obama also remains convinced that he has somehow acquired, as President, the mantle of not only sufficient authority to, but sufficient Solomon-like wisdom to decide which U.S. citizens he can order assassinated without trial.

I can't wait to see our next President use that on Ms. Schakowsky.

For The LOVE Of PETE

2010-09-30T19:13:00.000-04:00

So, the moving is mostly done; both our computers are up and running, networked, internet is up...

There are still some things to be done.

But we're coming along nicely.

I will be back (I hope) to my bloggeriffic habits in the next few days sometime, once I've gotten my computer all squared away and all the box carrying done for the immediate future.

I've missed you guys!

Disposable Nation

2010-09-03T10:57:00.000-04:00

Having stewed this around in my brain for a few weeks, it's time I finally allow you to share the vitriol and enjoy, yet again, one of my wacky ideas. (Pictured: stew.)

I hear a lot of people complain about the lack of product quality these days.

This goes for everything from hand tools, to cars, to food.

Across the board, "waaaaah! It's not as good as it was when I was a kid!"

You're right, it's not.

But maybe you don't understand why, and your own part in creating that situation.

So.

It's tempting, since the political left has done a stellar job of pushing the notion that all big corporations are automatically evil into the public consciousness (and, granted, some of those companies haven't done anything to help their own image; I'm looking at you, AIG,) to blame things on big-box retailers and discount chains. (Pictured: Evil Corporation.)

But that's not the whole story.

First, you must understand how a society works, and its purpose.

Back in the day, like 700 years ago, people followed trades.

Blacksmith; miller; farmer; there was a system of apprenticeship, whereby young men (historical correctness, y'all) could trade an established tradesman their time and effort for a number of years in exchange for learning the trade, and an eventual endorsement from their craftmaster as a reference when they opened their new business.

But why was this necessary?

I mean, why would you need a blacksmith at all? (Pictured: a good reason.)

Simple; the farmers didn't ALSO have time to shoe horses and forge plowshares. They had too much work to do.

The farther back technologically you go into history, the closer you come to seeing one family have to be entirely self-sufficient. Backbreaking labor, dawn to dusk, every single day, just to provide enough food to feed their families.

Waaaay back when, in the dawn of time, some brilliant guy, who was fairly competent at the forging bit - or maybe at barrel-making, or making candles, whatever - decided that he could make a living without having to milk cows, feed chickens, plow fields, harvest crops, train animals, repair damaged buildings, construct new buildings, build and maintain wagons and farm equipment, sort seed, pick weeds, chase off crows, deal with sick animals, and make candles, barrels, butter, and anything else he wanted all by himself.

The way he chose to do it was to specialize; he made his business exclusively by blacksmithing, and sold his labor - and its products - to the community, in exchange for not having to do all that other crap and still eat. (Pictured: Not having to do all that crap thanks to trade.)

Because he specialized, four things happened.

First, he got better at the craft of blacksmithing. Practice makes perfect, and someone who spends all their time on one chore is far more likely to discover ways to improve his technique than someone who does it only when desperately necessary. This, guys, was the motivating incident that spawned technological advancement. (More on this in a minute.)

Second, this took pressure off the farmers and surrounding community, as they no longer had to spend valuable time doing the tasks that he was performing; instead, they were able to trade part of the results of the labor they were already going to do anyway for his efforts. Because of this, agricultural production increased dramatically, as the farmers could devote more of their efforts directly towards production.

Third, this started us on the road towards capitalism. (More on this in a minute too.)

Fourth, this allowed other people to specialize, as well. Suddenly, there are chandleries, scriptoriums, cooperages, all manner of tasks getting done by people following a trade, because that way they could simply barter for their needs and not have to raise their own chickens.

So, after this system settled in place and became accepted, people realized that any clown could ride into town with a hammer and declare himself a blacksmith, and they would have no way to verify his skills. Thus the rise of the system of apprenticeship; when someone rode into town and could present a letter of reference from a particular (and known) master of his trade, the people in town could his skill in that trade. (Pictured: the consequences of charlatanry.)

Over time, that became more formalized, as craftsmen formed guilds, to allow their members to move themselves and their families greater distances than a single man's reputation was likely to spread.

But one thing remained constant: the skill of the tradesman determined his success. The quality of his products was a crucial factor in his community's willingness to purchase from him, and determined the price they were willing to pay for his products and services.

Thus the beginnings of capitalism; the price system. Basic economics is very simple: the price of a product is a measure of the costs of labor and materials to make the product, versus the amount the customer is willing to pay for the finished product, which is determined by need and quality. Something you desperately need, but is poor quality, will still draw a lower price than something equally needed but of greater quality.

Where you run into trouble is when the "quality" product is so MUCH more expensive than the inferior product that the difference in cost exceeds the increased value to the customer. (Pictured: superior versus inferior.)

Hold that thought.

Now, over time, as the various trades advanced technologically, they specialized further. Instead, for example, of a simple chandlery making all the night-time illumination for a village, you might have a chandlery for simple candles - and another merchant who, after buying parts from a blacksmith, made oil lamps.

As that specialization increased, so did two other things: customer choice, and free time.

The concept of a vacation was unknown, except to the very rich, until MAYBE a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago. (Pictured: Middle Ages vacation.)

But as society specializes further, it allows its citizens to invest less and less of their personal labor in subsistence, and a greater and greater portion of that time and labor in entertainment.

This is, ultimately, the purpose of specialization.

I personally can either do, or learn, everything necessary to build and run a small farm. As such, I possess, complete within myself, the ability to provide for my family.

But I'd never, ever be able to do anything else.

Because of specialization, I have time when I'm not at work, and can blog. (Pictured: typical blogger.)

This is ultimately one of the reasons "society" and "civilization" exists in the first place; having the freedom to do other things besides farm. (There's also mutual defense, but that's a different topic entirely.)

But, see, here's the thing.

Remember me saying something about price being partly determined by product quality?

When you live in a specialized society, you have the choice, not only of buying from a craftsman, but of which craftsman to buy from.

So, how do you make that choice? Cost versus value, and here's where we move forward into the modern age.

See, any business can undercut its competitors, if it's willing to sacrifice the quality of its products. (Pictured: an example.)

You can ALWAYS make something cheaper.

The thing is, the product is therefore less of a value to the consumer.

Simple, right?

Except that that equation leaves out something very important that I ALSO promised to come back to, namely, the fact that the difference in cost is INHERENTLY a value to the consumer.

Specifically, a cheaper product means you invest less of your labor, in the form of currency paid you for that labor, into that product, which means you have more money left for leisure activities and sustenance.

Which means that if it's cheap ENOUGH, you will care a lot less about the fact that it's also of miserable quality. (Thus explaining why everything is made in Malaysia or Honduras.)

So, we have discount stores. They sell products which are in every way but one inferior to those sold by other companies: cost.

We shop there. And every time we choose a $5 toaster made in Malaysia over a $10 one made in St. Louis, we are choosing to further specialize our society - and we're pushing our society further in the direction of ever more disposable merchandise.

Craftsman tools, the product of Sears, Roebuck, & Co., are excellent quality tools. So good, in fact, that they come with a lifetime warranty - your lifetime, not theirs. If they break, ever, you get a new tool. VALUE!!! (Pictured: value!)

But they're expensive. And when you choose to go to Family Dollar and buy a $40 "complete tool kit" of vastly lower quality, because of the price, you are incentivising the production of more low-quality goods, and DISincentivising the manufacture of Craftsman tools.

Reputation still counts, to some degree; this is why people buy Sony products.

But you'll notice that the PlayStation 3 - inarguably a better product than Microsoft's XBOX360 (60% failure rate) - is getting beaten, badly, in the marketplace, because Microsoft's product is cheaper.

Both are getting hammered, sales-wise (still!) by the Nintendo Wii, which is technologically inferior to both consoles, has a smaller library of new titles, and...

...Costs less than either. (Pictured: comparative sales.)

We have made of ourselves a nation dependent on disposability; we've worshipped at the altar of low, low prices to such an extent, and for so long, that craftsmanship is nearly extinct in our culture.

Was it worth it?

We live longer than anyone ever has in recorded history; we have better medical care, no matter what anyone says about it, greater access to the market, greater access to goods and services, greater consumer choice than ever before in history, and people are complaining about cheap manufacturing and not having enough time off work. (Pictured: protesters.)

So.

You, reading this, need to make a personal choice.

That choice is either to continue to support specialization - and cheap merchandise - in exchange for a long life span, good health care, availability of services, vacations, 40-hour work weeks, and being able to get fresh pineapple in Minnesota in February, or... not.

If you don't want to support specialization any more, you can take simple steps. Buy better products. Look at your purchases as investments in quality, and buy items manufactured to a higher quality standard in preference to the lower-priced, disposable stuff. Make things yourself.

You'll have to trade more of your "free" time for it, but those are the options. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If you want a return to the days when a TV set would last 45 years without a problem, spend the money to buy ones that do.

But if you participate in the Disposable Nation that allows all of us to exist without 16-hour days of backbreaking labor just to produce vegetable stew again, stop complaining about it and try understanding what it is and why it works. (Pictured: more stew, just to make a point.)

This is the PURPOSE of a society: to guarantee you the ability to get the most out of life that you can with the least amount of necessary work to achieve it; this requires lowering products' individual craftsmanship in order to allow you that privilege.

And you cannot get to the one goal without also reaching the other.

Thank you for reading and have a great day. (Pictured: a great day in Minneapolis.)

A Local Favorite... And One Of Mine.

2010-09-02T20:35:00.000-04:00

The Travel Channel did a special a while back talking about a particular kind of hamburger native to the Twin Cities, called the "Jucy Lucy."

Having seen it on TV, of course you know we had to go find the place that (according to the Travel Channel) sells the best ones, and try them.

They were awesome.

But since you guys mostly don't LIVE in the Twin Cities, I figured it would only be fair to share the love.

So, here we go.

*Drumroll, please*

You need:

Hamburger meat; sufficient for the number of people you want to feed.

Worcestershire sauce.

Cheese, either singles (better for melting, not as good cheese) or shredded (the opposite.)

An egg. (optional; Kelli didn't use one, but I always do when making burgers.)

Sliced white or yellow onion.

Olive oil (1 tbsp.) or butter (likewise.)

Hamburger buns and condiments.

Start off by mixing the hamburger, egg, and Worcestershire sauce (to taste) together until it is thoroughly mixed. Hand-kneading works best for this, but your clean-up will be "ewwwwww"-inducing.

Once the meat is mixed, make it into thin, broad patties. You want mid-sized patties as far as circumference, but make them thin. Set them out in pairs.

Put the oil or butter in a frying pan and heat; caramelize your onions until they are transparent and soft.

Now, take the cheese, and put it on one of each pair of patties. If you're using singles, fold them until they break into squares; if you're using shredded, just put a little pile of it in the middle of the patty. Place the second of the pair over it, and pinch the edges of the two patties together, so that the cheese is entirely contained in the pouch created by the two patties.

When your patties are ready, fry or grill them until they are a little more done than you normally would. The cheese will create a cooler area near the center, so err on the side of caution.

Once done, slap them on a bun with your normal fixin's, and throw on some of the caramelized onions.

My way is mayo, mustard, onions, and patty; nothing more necessary. You're welcome to experiment, though. Bacon seems like it might be a good idea.

Be careful when you eat; the cheese will be quite hot, and both messy and a burn hazard if you did it correctly.

But it's worth every bit of it; a beefy, cheesy volcano of delight.

Enjoy!

Just Because I Did...

2010-08-31T20:47:00.000-04:00

Created by Oatmeal

And for a somewhat more select list...

2010-08-25T01:43:00.000-04:00

...than my earlier article, because all of you have at least some familiarity with the matter to which I was referring or to my own situation.

So let's combine the two; for those of you not overly invested in my personal affairs, I will be brief and try to avoid dragging you into matters you don't care about.

A few weeks ago, my general feelings of cautious optimism about my immediate situation were shattered when someone tried to sabotage me.

A person unknown to me mass-messaged several of my family and friends, from a pseudonymous facebook account, alleging that I had committed every crime under the sun and then some, and calling me a fairly limited but awfully repetitive series of unpleasant names.

Of course, I was then deluged with messages from those family members and friends, questioning me as to either my well-being and the sanity of the messenger, or as to the truth of the allegations, dependent on the willingness of the individual to believe random messages from total strangers over their own personal experiences with me.

Annoying.

I have since determined who this individual is.

This person's harassment campaign is stepping up; they are really making an effort to make life difficult for me.

They are doing so armed with any wild-eyed accusation my ex-wife can hand them.

As such, I am working on getting myself a lawyer.

In a brighter note, I have been raised to full time already, after having been on the payroll less than three months. This is great, both in terms of income and in terms of my future prospects at Giant_Retail_Chain_00, but it is a serious and inconvenient schedule adjustment.

So.

These two factors, along with some things I am quite sure none of you would be sufficiently interested to read if I typed them out, are causing me an enormous amount of stress on all levels, emotional, physical, and financial.

So please understand the intent of my previous post.

You guys are the ones that I think are really important; the people who, for me, are either close enough to me personally that I care about you and what you think, or people whose ideas are sufficiently well-thought out and presented that I would get that muscle under my eye going "bing!" again if I couldn't read your posts, even if I don't always (or even often) comment.

...And yes, I am aware that NONE of you ALWAYS agrees with the things you write; I write not to gain the approbation of my audience, but simply to present my thoughts on things - and in practice, I find writing things down tends to clarify my thought processes, and make my own thoughts more clear not only to you, but to me as well.

This is a place and an outlet that I desperately need.

But if it becomes a haven for drama that I am unable to avoid, I will offer each one of you some contact information - that is, those who don't already have it - and quietly move along.

I love you guys.

I used that phrase in my other post, somewhat more loosely.

SV, Jesi, Ben, Retro, WOTN: you guys have never been all that PERSONALLY close to me, but I have the utmost respect, on every level, for your thinking and your ideas, even when I disagree.

I hope that one day I will get to know you all better.

Eby and CJ: you guys are an awesome couple, and while neither of you tends towards the kind of essayist writings that the above people do, I like you both tremendously and read your exploits with delight and frequent laughter.

Suzanne, you and I have spent a lot of time talking, discussing, consoling, and advising each other, though less lately. I hope that resumes; and for the record, you guys simply could not find a better person to have as a friend. Lily is a gem, and has a first-class brain on the occasions that she decides to really go to work on something.

Lee and Janet; what can I say? I've been reading Lee's blog for years, and though we're not twined around each other like roots from neighboring trees, I'd like to think that we're buddies, at least.

The pancakes thought so, anyway.

And who argues with pancakes?

One of these days we will figure out a way for us to join you two at a Chiefs game, and then a way to drag you to a Vikings game.

There is literally no-one on this site whose views I respect more than Lee's, even when I disagree.

Seriously, dude, call me one of these days real soon.

Crystal, you and I often fight like cats and dogs - which I admit is usually my fault - but I am very aware of how hard a road you've walked, and as I am finding my own feet on similarly sharp cobblestones, it only increases my respect for your perseverance.

...Even if sometimes I wonder what the heck you just said, lol.

Jeanette...

For those of you who don't know her, jeanette is, literally, my best friend in the world. I have known her for years and years; she knows more about me than anyone. (Although Ros is catching up fast.) She has stood by me through thick and thin, through real-life issues and has proven herself as my friend a million times over.

You guys would be honored to be her friends, even though she doesn't talk much. (You can get her to talk if you pester her enough, though.)

And Ros.

Kelli is my heart, and she is the one person who I always go to when things really go to shit.

And then she tells me to stop fucking up and get on with it.

She also arm-twists me into posting a lot of articles that most likely would not otherwise see the light of day.

I don't think I've ever laughed harder in all my life than I did while writing my article about Harry Potter fans - and then reading her reply that all my mockery was basically dead on.

She also doesn't say much on here, in part because she's not nearly as political as I am, and in further part because she has a tendency to get so worked up over the things that she DOES get excited about that she can't make coherent arguments because she just wants to slap the hell out of the offending douchebag. (Usually Obama in recent times.)

She makes me happy.

I love you guys.

This is a very tough time for me, personally.

Whether or not you guys realized it, each of you in your own way has helped me survive, and press on.

Never think, for a second, that I don't recognize and appreciate it, or that I would let you guys slip without trying my damnedest to stay in touch.

And if any of you ever need me, I will be there.

Any time, world-wide, day or night.

I will bring ammo and beer. Providing the pigs to roast is on you.

Neutral Ground

2010-08-25T01:12:00.000-04:00

I know that some of you to whom this article is available will have no clue what I'm going on about. Congratulations! You're not involved in what I'm going to talk about, and can totally ignore this.

I want to discuss in passing some things that have been brought to my attention over the last few days.

I say "in passing," because I am not involved, don't know the details, and don't want to.

I also say "in passing," because, not knowing any of the details, and not desiring for anyone to fill me in, I am not directing this at, or to, any specific person or group; I don't know who's wrong, don't want to find out, and frankly don't give a fuck.

I have a few contacts; more than some, less than others.

It is inevitable, in any such arrangement, that some will dislike, or even hate, others.

Which is their right.

But the explosions of drama that I have witnessed on several of my friends' pages in recent days WILL NOT occur here.

I want to be perfectly clear, so there is no possibility whatsoever of misunderstanding.

Right now, I am having some personal, non-internet related difficulties. Those of you who know me well enough to care already know more details than they were likely interested in, and the rest have no real need to know.

But suffice to say that I have enough drama in my life right now that honestly I couldn't give a FLYING FUCK what goes on between my contacts, so long as they are friendly and well-behaved with ME.

I love you guys. Several of you have proven yourselves true friends; some of you know me from outside multiply; some of you have known me - both on here and personally - for literally years. Some of you are newer in my constellation of friends, but present because I like you. Some of you I've been lucky enough to meet in real life after meeting you on here. You guys are a treasure trove of differing views, differing personalities, and wildly differing lifestyles. All of you are my friends, to one degree or another, and I value you all immensely.

On my site, whatever the situation that exists here, you get along. Argue about politics, call all the names you want about politics or any news I report or article I write, fine.

Discussion of relevant topics can be as no-holds-barred as it needs to be; in that regard my page has always been a free-fire zone.

But personal, non-topical, unrelated drama spillover from events and discussions outside my page is unwelcome here, now and always.

I am having a tough time personally, guys.

Many of you are near and dear to me.

So please understand the gravity of what I am going to say here.

If there is a drama explosion of the magnitude of the ones I have seen over the last three nights on my page, there will be two levels of response.

The first level is that I will ban each and every participant. Full blocks; no warning, no repeal.

If anyone then complains to me about my cataclysmic unfairness in doing so, I WILL FOLD MY FUCKING TENT AND LEAVE.

I have kept this blog going, sometimes with minor hiatuses for various reasons, but pretty steadily overall, for the better part of six years. It has at various times been a forum for me to simply rant and complain; a home for my political essays, whose quality both of writing and thought I leave up to your judgment; a place for me to tell about positive things in my life; a social home for me on the web.

That last fits best, I guess; Multiply has been very good to me indeed, and I find myself more comfortable here by far than among the endless farmville posts on Facebook or the meaningless status updates on Myspace.

And I am telling you, one and all, here and now, that my personal life is too demanding right now for me to get dragged into this bullshit by the inevitable gravitational field that seems to surround such things.

I have real-life issues that require my attention; I cannot spare any for shit that, frankly, all and sundry should have outgrown around the time that people graduated high school.

I really don't want to have to make that decision.

So, I am asking.

Please.

If you guys value my presence on Multiply as anything worth keeping, please behave on my page. I am not involved; do not want to be involved; do not want to have the reasons I should be involved explained to me in personal messages; do not want an uncategorical enumeration of some other user's flaws, either in private or public; I want nothing whatsoever to do with this.

Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts on the subject.

Also, This.

2010-08-18T22:58:00.000-04:00

Common Sense, How The Fuck Does It Work?

2010-08-18T15:57:00.000-04:00

This is a good question, since there seems to be precious little of it around these days.

So, in this long and rambling article, I will attempt to apply some to an issue which has had much blather and little serious discussion over the last few weeks: the mosque at Ground Zero.

But first, I want to begin by discussing a technique used by many hypnotists as a means of changing their subjects' views.

Whoa, gear change, right?

I promise, all will be made clear.

In the branch of hypnosis known as neuro-linguistic programming, NLP for short, there's a technique known as "reframing." Reframing is a method of altering the terms of the discussion in such a way that the subject is steered inexorably towards logic chains that contradict their previously held views.

In therapy, this is used to help patients overcome, for example, negative self-image problems. By altering the terms upon which someone defines the outcome of a situation, you alter their perception of that situation - and when that altered perception conflicts with their previously-held convictions, why, you have a marvelous lever with which to move their thoughts into healthier channels.

For example, if someone doesn't get invited to a theme party that all their friends are invited to, because the host thinks that the theme might offend them, they might believe that they were left out because they are disliked; applying the knowledge that the host was trying to avoid giving offense, the therapist can steer the patient into understanding that that decision was made as a gesture of respect and appreciation, instead of an insult.

Marvelously effective if used correctly.

However, like any technique which is founded on changing the perception of the listener, it is also marvelously easy to use for the wrong reasons.

And here is where we come to the Cordoba Initiative.

See, the liberals have been persistently and forcefully trying to reframe the debate surrounding the mosque two blocks from the former site of the Twin Towers; trying to alter the terms, so that it is not a debate about the calculated, magnificent insult expressed by someone so contemptuous of our value that they would build a monument, mere blocks away from the site of the deaths of thousands of innocent people slaughtered by fanaticism, to the source of that fanaticism itself; instead, it becomes a debate between people passionately believing in freedom of religion and Constitutional protections, versus illiterate, backwards cavemen who are trying to repress something they don't understand.

Thankfully, I am here to destroy that attempt at reframing, and cause the entire tangled mess to collapse upon its silly, misshapen, and ungainly head through vigorous application of the aforementioned common sense.

The first, and most obvious, flaw in this attempt at reframing is that there has been essentially no actual element of religious discrimination in the commentary provided by the Cordoba Initiative's opponents. They have called it an insult, a desecration, a sacrilege, and it is all those things; they have said repeatedly that it SHOULD not be built; but none of them have attempted to claim that the project's backers should be BANNED from building it.

In order to reframe, you dribbling dolts, you have first to provide information that is actually truthful; you cannot simply lie your way to success.

The second flaw in this attempt at reframing, however, is more disturbing; it is that the backers of the mosque appear to be doing everything in their power to thumb their noses at us; making the Cordoba Initiative a far greater insult thanks to their utter and oblivious tone-deafness than it would have been had they simply said something like "we got a great deal on the land and can't afford to build it anywhere else, so please work with us here."

If they had, I suspect that most Americans would still be grumpy about it, but I doubt greatly that we would see 68% of the American people publicly state that they think it shouldn't be built.

Why do I mention that?

Because that's the latest poll number. 68% of the American people think that mosque shouldn't be built.

"Aha!" Cries the left, "You're against it because you hate Islam!"

Then why aren't they picketing and protesting against the other - many - mosques in New York, hmmm?

It is not the religion people are protesting; it is the geography.

The proposed site of the Cordoba House - which will, itself, be discussed in detail shortly - is two blocks from Ground Zero.

"Aha!" Cries the left, "You're using charged language to try to force an emotional response!"

Do you have a better name for a site sanctified by the blood of so many innocent people?

Sanctified. Hallowed. Made holy; a place on which a sacrifice so great was laid that it scarred the people whose children, fathers, sisters, wives, and sons bore it forever, a place in which any disrespect of that sacrifice should not be tolerated - because no matter how great our devotion to toleration of others, as a people and a nation, in our bones we know that some things ought not to BE tolerated.

Building a Hitler Memorial Museum at Auschwitz, for example, or a Shinto shrine in memory of Emperor Hirohito outside of Pearl Harbor. Every people, every race, every nation, has places they consider sacred, for whatever reason, and some of those places have become the greatest battlefields in the world for the sake of protecting them from insult.

Perhaps Japan would like a Manhattan Project Commemorative Monument erected at Hiroshima.

But I doubt it very much.

See, the first question one must ask of the Cordoba Initiative is, "why there?"

Why MUST it be built upon ground that nearly every American sees as sacred? Is it not possible to erect a mosque, a cultural center, whatever they're calling it this week, on the other side of Manhattan, and provide the same "community outreach" its backers claim is its goal, without giving vast and implacable offense to the people whose relatives stained that ground with their blood that day?

Is it truly beyond the bounds of possibility to simply decide that whether or not it CAN be done, it SHOULD NOT be?

Having the legal ability to do something doesn't make it right.

For example, I can in perfect safety, enshrined within my legal right to free speech, walk up to you and call you names, provided I don't swear at you or make accusations constituting slander.

I could say - and I leave it to each of my three readers to decide which of these terms could ACCURATELY be applied to them, if they're honest enough about it - that you are a beer-swilling, apathetic, logically inconsistent, hypocritical, morally degenerate, lecherous, ethically challenged, self-interested, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, unattractive, loud-mouthed, opinionated, shiftless layabout who works no more than necessary and plots overwhelming vengeance for any slight, real or imagined, but rarely has the intestinal fortitude to actually carry it out for fear of the real-world consequences; guess what, that's perfectly legal.

That doesn't make saying it the right thing to do, no matter which (if any) parts apply to the individual to whom I'm speaking.

For the record, and to prove the unflinching nature of my own self-assessment, all those apply equally to me - although I note that that leaves out my many sterling qualities. For example, I am a good tipper.

...Because it pays to have happy servers; they are less likely to do bizarre and disgusting things to your food.

At any rate, the point at which I am rudely groping (and from which, might I add, dodging increasingly energetic slaps,) is simple: just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

The attempt at reframing the debate on the part of so many of our left-wing loudmouths is just that: an attempt to convince by twisting the debate until the original point is lost. This is not, and never was, a debate about religious freedom, First Amendment protections, or the "right" of the Cordoba Initiative to build their mosque wherever they want, because no-one has claimed they legally can't. No-one has tried to prohibit them from doing it; instead, they have sought to shame them into withdrawing.

And the imam Faisal Rauf has proven immune to shame.

Why?

This is a man who is trying to build a monument, he says, to "tolerance," which angers 70% of the people in whose hearts it is supposedly meant to inspire brotherhood; that fact alone should inspire him to, perhaps, put it somewhere else.

There is no shortage of mosques in New York.

Only the geography, and the price in blood paid for its sanctity, makes this location special.

But if "tolerance" and "brotherhood" were in fact the imam's goals, he would relocate elsewhere.

And he's not.

Instead, he has sought the backing of HAMAS, a recognized terrorist organization, which publicly announced their support for it just the other day.

He has traveled across the Middle East, raising funds to build it from the very nations whose children killed the thousands whose blood invest the site with such hallowed gravity, and to add insult to injury, he has done so on the U.S. taxpayer's dime.

Yet no taxpayer funds were released to help rebuild the church which stood equally close since the 1920s, a church leveled when one of the towers fell on it.

Why?

Many of us remember the fervor with which the Democrats demolished President Bush's "faith-based initiatives," once he was out of office.

Where is that anti-establishment fervor when it comes to funding for an Islamic "faith-based initiative," hmmmm?

Where is the sense of moral outrage, the fervent and furious denunciation?

There is none.

Because the Democrats are trying to side with the group they perceive as the victor in the upcoming cultural siege.

See, here in this country, we praise tolerance as though it has merit of its own not predicated upon the value of those things being tolerated.

Chamberlain found out the hard way that when you tolerate the wrong things, things which do not tolerate you, the price for that tolerance may be steep indeed.

We "tolerated" Islam, endlessly, in the wake of 9/11.

Muslims weren't hung in the streets; they weren't kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, as their coreligionists did to our soldiers, journalists, and innocent bystanders on live television.

They weren't even banned from businesses.

So where is their toleration for us?

Where is their much-vaunted religious toleration, when the majority of the people of our nation say to them, "this is unacceptable to us; move it somewhere - anywhere - else."

I wonder why it is that they who constantly demand toleration from others, so carefully avoid extending it to anyone else?

Islam preaches that gays should be killed; that women dressed immodestly should be killed; that unmarried fornicators should be killed; that those who do not believe as they should be killed, converted, or forced to live in servitude.

How can that BE tolerated?

Those who do not tolerate YOU, should not be tolerated.

I wonder what gives Obama the sense that it is simultaneously ok to demand that Prime Minister Netanyahu display "tolerance" by not building homes in the Gaza Strip - on the grounds that it is sacred to the Palestinians - yet deny New Yorkers the right to self-determine in the same way?

Explain it to me.

Why does Obama think that Palestinians deserve concessions not granted to his OWN CITIZENS?

THAT is what this debate is about. Not "rights," but the right thing to do.

Building a mosque at Ground Zero isn't it.

But it has even more significance than even this, yet to be revealed.

See, the very name of the project is part and parcel of the insult - the deliberate insult - that Faisal Rauf is inflicting upon the West, with the calculated support and defense of the politicians of New York and the nation, in defiance of the will of the people.

Cordoba was the site upon which, when Islam conquered Spain in the 700s, a gigantic mosque and "cultural center" was built - upon the site of the slaughter of thousands - as a symbol to the Spaniards that Islam had conquered them.

If this project had taken place under any other name, it could have been shrugged off as callousness alone; Faisal Rauf's tone-deafness to the nation in whose precincts he resides.

But under the name Cordoba House, there is no other way to construe it; the very name itself is a deliberate statement of calculated insult, intended to give us - and the world - the exact impression that it gives: "We win. Your politicians helped us, and continue to do so. You cannot stop us."

Because, you see, this is what truly gives the other team the edge in this little cultural contretemps; they BELIEVE that they are right, and we as a nation should be destroyed; and we BELIEVE that we as a nation should be willing to tolerate anything, under the guise of religious freedom.

There is, and can be, no "toleration" of a knife at your throat, if you hope to live.

They may not articulate it as such, but Joe American sees that.

And they are furious, for those charged with the sacred trust of defending us from foreign invaders, foreign oppressors, are aiding them in their invasion, abetting their oppression.

If Cordoba House were about peace, it would be somewhere else.

And it wouldn't be "Cordoba" anything.

The fact that it is as close to Ground Zero as possible, and named as it is, indicates that Faisal Rauf is not tone-deaf; he knows exactly how angry Americans are about it, and he is thumbing his nose at us, because he knows that our own doctrine of tolerating anything just because it's different bares our throats to the blade.

This mosque is his way of saying so, to the world.

It's legal.

He has the privilege of being allowed to build it if he wants.

But there is nothing, no force on earth, that can make building it "right," in any sense of the word.

And we ought to quit trying to disguise it as anything else but an offense.

Kick-Ass, Which Kicked Ass

2010-08-12T22:21:00.000-04:00

So, we Redboxed Kick-Ass.

If you don't understand that phrase, kindly step forward into the internet generation, you Neanderthal.

At any rate, we finally got a chance to see it, and almost immediately found out what the controversy was all about.

See, there was controversy surrounding this movie.

I will get to it.

OK, spoiler-free, the movie is about a kid who gets tired of seeing petty crimes going unpunished and unopposed by Joe Citizen, and decides to become a "super" hero, in his case by donning a hideous green and yellow wetsuit and going out to...

...Well, get stabbed and then run over by a car.

What, he's a noob.

Of course, once healed, he follows it up by saving a guy from a beating at the hands of three punks, and gets in a great line; one of the punks asks him "What the fuck is wrong with you?" and he responds, "three of you laying into one guy while everyone else watches, and you're asking what's wrong with ME?!"

I will say up front that this movie is quite bloody.

And that's where the controversy comes in.

See, virtually all the actual significant violence, death, or injury in the movie is inflicted by Hit Girl, played by Chloe Moretz.

Hit Girl is around 11.

Chloe Moretz is actually 13.

Which makes the fact that she kills at least 23 people in the movie (this site says 40,) swears a LOT - some things you'd hope a girl that age wouldn't actually know, much less say in a movie - and basically plays a child sociopath trained as an assassin from birth, a little disturbing.

What makes it worse is that the character is fucking awesome.

You really, really don't want to find yourself rooting for a child in those kinds of circumstances, particularly since that child - or the actress, anyway - has to actually know those words and be at least peripherally aware of the violence she's portraying, and some of the stunts could not be reproduced by any amount of green-screening.

To put it in perspective, her previous roles have included 31 episodes as Darby on "My Friends Tigger and Pooh."

Ouch.

But the real deal is that Hit Girl is clearly the true hero of the movie. She saves almost all the "good guys," wipes the floor with the bad guys, and generally, well, kicks ass.

So, is it good or bad? On the good side, well, she wins; evil is punished, with frankly very little help from either the titular wannabe, or any of the significant adults in her life, and on the bad, well...

...I don't think the bullies at a regular school are really prepared for her.

Kick-Ass's comic-loving schlub buddies nail it, I think.

"Hit Girl is fucking awesome!"

"Dude, she's like 11."

"For her? I'll wait! I am so going to save myself for her."

At any rate, gory, bloody, at times very funny, and we're buying it.

So, Here's Some More Opinionated Rambling.

2010-08-12T13:46:00.000-04:00

See, there's a curious divide in America, and it's not between the "haves" and "have nots," but between people who are capable of understanding their own situation, and those who aren't.

There's an issue that's making political hay for both sides right now: illegal immigration.

It's a totally simple issue, actually, but politicians want to make it complex, because if it's complex, they can bamboozle a broad swath of the voting public into whatever they want from their agenda because people don't understand it.

So what IS illegal immigration, anyway?

Well, it's where there is a legal process for someone to enter a country, and become a resident, and someone decides not to follow it.

They break the law.

They enter the country illegally, they remain in the country illegally, and they take advantage of the system of that country as far as they can until they get caught.

Now, politicians on one team blather about how state laws are trying to "criminalize" illegal immigrants.

That's actually impossible; see, when you break the law, you are a criminal.

Federal law prohibits entry into the United States other than by the legal, prescribed methods; therefore illegal immigrants are criminals.

So, no law here can "criminalize" them; they are criminals because they're here.

Other politicians are blathering about eliminating the 14th Amendment, which states that a person born in the United States is a citizen of the United States.

This law is used by illegals to gain residency without using the legal channels; they get pregnant, they get close to their delivery time, and they sneak across the border to have their child, knowing that once that has happened, they can't - under current law - be sent home.

This group of politicians are half right, and all wrong.

See, the problem with amending the Constitution is that you cannot then predict what ELSE will get amended.

Yeah, anchor babies are a problem; but repealing the 14th Amendment is not the best way to go about it.

Improving border security is the best way to do it; keep them from sneaking in, and then you don't have to worry about anchor babies.

Convening a Constitutional convention, allowing Congress to change the fundamental, most basic law of our nation's social contract, is a terrible idea. Because there's no way whatsoever to predict what our elected officials would be able to get changed, especially in this era of back-room deals and secret agreements among our politicians.

Guard the border, and do not let them across. That is how to accomplish a solution to the problem.

Then we have the flap over Arizona SB 1070.

Arizona SB 1070 is a state law that echoes federal law.

One hundred percent of what SB 1070 does is to require state law enforcement officers to enforce existing federal immigration laws.

Politicians are screaming about Nazis, and having to show your papers, but federal immigration law makes it a crime - a felony, a deportable offense - to fail to carry your immigration documents and identification on your person AT ALL TIMES if you are an immigrant.

Immigrants are already required by law to do what the Arizona law requires; the federal officers tasked with enforcement are simply not doing their jobs.

Politicians are also screaming about "racial profiling."

The Arizona law not only requests, but requires, that all state law enforcement officers take classes in avoiding that exact thing.

It states that officers can only EVEN CHECK the immigration status of people who have already been detained for something else; in other words, only people who are already suspected of breaking the law in other ways.

Which means that the politicians who are trying to reverse the Arizona bill, are supporting rapists, murderers, thieves, drug pushers, human smugglers, vandals, and other various and sundry miscreants.

Because if officers aren't allowed to stop people for breaking the law, then there is no law.

The supporters of illegal immigration are, de facto, saying that they believe that the criminals are more important than the law-abiding citizens.

These same people try to remove the ability of the citizens to defend themselves by violating the Constitutionally-guaranteed right to keep and bear arms, knowing full well that if there is a law against guns, the only people who will have guns are those who ignore the law to begin with.

The supporters of gun control laws are, de facto, saying that they believe that the criminals are more important than the law-abiding citizens.

There are plenty of our politicians - again, often the same ones - who turn the cities under their control into "sanctuaries," places in which the officials in charge of protecting the citizens and upholding the law simply refuse to enforce that law.

They are, de facto, saying that they believe that the criminals are more important than the law-abiding citizens.

There are even more of our politicians who are scheming to return from political exile in triumph, using the indignation of the citizenry against the politicians currently in power as a means of overcoming the indignation of those same citizens against themselves; relying on the citizens to forget that mere years before, they raged against the schemers with frustration just as vast, just as fiery.

Those politicians are potentially committing political suicide, not for themselves, but for our existing system, and they do not know it.

Because when they return to power, and in turn betray their constituents, ignoring their will and needs in favor of a return to what those politicians see as the desired status quo, those constituents will be done with them.

Not even so much as a terror of the alternative will force them to remain.

Because there is another force in American politics, and the "establishment," on both sides of the figurative aisle, is terrified of it.

One side is trying to co-opt it, and the other tries to dismiss it.

But both fear it.

Because they know that no amount of political grandstanding will save their fortunes should that growing force become a legitimate third party.

And all it would take would be for the conservatives in this election to continue to believe that they can conduct business as usual.

This election isn't about illegal immigration. It's not about gay marriage, it's not about anchor babies or crime or the economy.

It is about one thing, and one thing only: are our politicians our servants, as the Founders dictated, or are we theirs?

Our politicians openly and obviously believe, regardless of their associations, that we serve them, and not the reverse.

They believe that criminals, and their rights, are more important than the citizens, and their rights.

They believe that the economy only matters insofar as they can loot it for their own gain.

They vote themselves massive increases in their pay and benefits at a time when millions of their citizens are unemployed, homeless, stricken with poverty, reeling under financial collapse and massive debt thanks to the fiscal policies of those same politicians; they ignore the measures that would actually benefit the citizenry because they believe - truly believe - that the economy cannot, ultimately, collapse.

They believe that the golden goose cannot die, cannot stop laying eggs, and will always provide for them.

They are wrong.

On both sides of the aisle, their policies are leading us towards disaster both fiscal and social.

They cannot see it.

We can.

And they must not be given a chance to make it even worse.

Notice must be served to the Republicans. If they take the Congress in this election, and then abandon their constituents in favor of business as usual, they will have destroyed their own electorate.

And they will have made a force of the Tea Party that they will neither be able to control or stop.

Strictly Opinion, With No Scientific Basis Whatsoever...

2010-08-11T01:27:00.000-04:00

...Largely because scientists, while brilliant in their fields, can be fucking retarded in other ways.

Yeah, I said it.

For quite a while now, scientists and statisticians alike (for they are indeed very different, as anyone who's ever requested demographic numbers on anything can tell you,) have been bemoaning the declining birth rate in Western nations.

They've studied, brainstormed, discussed ad nauseam, and still, the conclusion remains the same: across the spectrum of developed nations, the birth rate is declining steadily, and despite many theories, no-one's come up with anything concrete that explains it. (The United States is #124 in the world, and a large portion of its rank is made up of children of ethnic minorities.)

Hold on to that thought.

Recently, studies by other scientists completely unconnected to the folks studying declining birth rates have discovered a startling and (to some,) disturbing trend: girls in Western nations are hitting puberty earlier.

The evidence is incontrovertible; where previously - as recently as the 1990's - the average age for onset of puberty was between 14 and 15, now it is around 12.

This is a change of 3 years in the global average, in less than 20 years; it has dropped IN A SINGLE GENERATION by about 20%.

That's a change of staggering magnitude.

In fact, as many as 10% of Caucasian girls, 15% of Hispanic girls, and 25% of African-descended girls have hit puberty by age seven.

Again, science is stumped.

Theories are advanced, much hypothesizing is done, and there is much wringing of hands in the segments of the scientific community studying this phenomenon; but no concrete reason for this has yet been found.

Don't worry, I am here for that.

See, these two segments of the scientific communities don't talk much.

And that's a problem.

Because if they did, they'd notice that the two are tied together.

Whatever force is in control of our biological processes as a species, be it conscious guidance (God,) or "natural processes," whatever those are in the absence of a designer, nature - make that Nature - responds to stimuli.

For whatever reason, our species, at least in the West, is declining, and that's apparently not in the cards.

So, Nature is reacting, by increasing the years available for females to reproduce.

Also, I might add, doing a bang-up job of making said reproduction more likely; no matter how frank and honest their parents are, there are precious few seven (!) year olds who are emotionally equipped to make informed, rational reproductive decisions.

Which means that when they are suddenly assaulted by a flood of hormones driving their bodies to change in ways they aren't ready for, emotions they don't know what to do with, and sensations they don't understand but like a WHOLE LOT, they are likely to make, instead, uninformed, irrational, bad, stupid reproductive decisions.

See, Nature doesn't care about our child-rearing environments.

It DOES, however, care for our continued viability as a species, which is primarily represented by our number of surviving offspring.

If we're reproducing successfully, then we are a successful species.

Thus, we are presented by a situation in which our females - the single limiting factor on the number of offspring - enter childbearing age sooner, and remain in it longer.

See, men can impregnate essentially as many women as they can convince to sleep with them; in theory, several per day.

But once a woman gets pregnant, she stays that way until the child is born, thus removing her from the breeding pool until she delivers the child, recovers, and returns to "availability."

Thus, affecting the number of MEN has far lesser effect on the population as a whole.

But affecting WOMEN changes the entire dynamic.

Now, our Western cultural mores are an historical anomaly.

Follow along with me, here; rest assured, I have a point.

In the past, girls were frequently married off, and bearing children, as young as 11 or 12; particularly during periods of greatly reduced population. (As witness, the explosion of population growth that followed the Black Plague.)

The simple, albeit repulsive to Western sensibilities, rule has almost always been, throughout human history: "if there's grass on the field..."

Only since the growth of industrial civilization, and the concomitant advances in medical technology, have women truly gained any measure of equality.

Only since the advent of our recent (~200 years) technological advancement have we, as a species, had the LUXURY of having women as a group able to choose NOT to bear children; our notion that anything under 18 is "underage" is incredibly recent.

Bear also in mind that it is only in the last century that we have seen such massive cultural overspecialization that our children can remain so until they are 18 - and in many cases beyond. In an agrarian culture, based primarily around subsistence farming, every available hand is needed; children begin working from the time they can perform a task at all, because their help is required.

In the world that was, a girl of 14 was typically already a wife and mother.

In the world that is, a girl of 14 is just beginning to learn how to be a woman at all.

But our culture - that tolerant culture that allows adolescent rebellion to carry on into the mid-20's, and makes it illegal for children to be put to work until they are 16 - is about to meet up with a simple fact.

Nature does not care about our cultural sensitivities.

Nature does not care about our preferences, our ideas, or our childrearing plans.

Nature simply demands that we have more kids.

And the results of that have great potential to be harsh indeed on a cultural level for us.

Sex education is a touchy subject, particularly in our political climate; of our two major American political parties, we have one team who wants to inculcate children from birth with knowledge of everything under the sun about sex, thus virtually ensuring that they will have it as soon as possible; and one team whose idea seems to be that if we just tell them not to do it, and then pretend it doesn't exist, it'll go away.

Both ideas seem stupid to me, but I'm crazy, and therefore not to be taken as any sort of authority on this whatsoever. My own plan, for my son, is to wait until he asks me questions, and then answer them as honestly as I can, and hope he doesn't do anything stupid without asking Dad first.

Which I grant is probably as bad an idea as the ones espoused by our political monkeys.

But here's the thing.

Puberty makes girls look different.

Hell, it even makes them SMELL different.

And if we have girls who look, at 11, as mature as the girls we grew up with looked at 16, people will likely see them as older than they really are - and with the experience and maturity (or lack thereof, as the case may be,) to be expected not at their REAL age, but at the age they APPEAR to be.

As a culture, the impact of this cannot be underestimated.

Now, people go to jail for "she looked 18" when she was really 16 - and enthusiastically encouraging her partner to believe she was older, until he annoyed her in some way.

How much worse will that become, if girls can pass for 18, who are 13?

Girls are getting taller earlier; developing sexually mature features earlier; and most importantly, their sexual responses and instincts are turning on earlier, too.

Which means that they will - in their inexperience - be even more enthusiastic in their attempts to grab any reasonably cute guy, and find out what all the fuss among their friends is about.

Because they're not old enough to make rational decisions about sex at that age.

Because our culture teaches them not to be.

Which, ultimately, I guess, is where I'm going with this; as a culture, we have to brace for impact, and start - now - trying to figure out how to deal with it.

I am personally quite certain that both our political parties are wrong about it.

But we might need to rethink sex ed classes altogether; redesign from the ground up.

Because if girls are getting a head start this much earlier - and from the evidence, guys aren't experiencing similar changes - they ARE going to start pursuing older males. A 7-year-old girl who goes into puberty is NOT going to find a 7-year-old boy interested, or even capable, of making out with her.

He might try to wow her with his G.I. Joes, though.

And if we cannot treat the sexes THE SAME, we must begin to acknowledge that while they have equal value, and equal legal status, they are simply DIFFERENT.

For myself, personally, I am delighted that at this point I have a son, with at least a few years of Thomas the Tank Engine and Willy Wonka ahead of him before I need to worry about those questions.

But parents with daughters need to give this some serious thought.

Ten percent by age seven.

Something tells me Chris Hansen is going to be seeing a lot more work over the next few years, because our culture has convinced itself to step away from the practices of the past to such an extent that our children are not capable of adapting to a return to those practices.

We've cherished innocence to such a degree that we've enshrined it.

Nature doesn't care about it.

And our attitudes and expectations are about to run face first into that fact.

Brace for impact.

A Nearly Perfect Resignation: A Photo Essay

2010-08-10T22:55:00.000-04:00

...Which does not in fact require much in the way of commentary from me. To set the stage, a young lady by the name of Jenny decided to quit her job.

In order to ensure that everyone at her former workplace understood exactly what happened and why, and armed only with a digital camera, a dry-erase board, and a (valid) complaint, she took the following series of 33 pictures, comprising possibly the greatest resignation letter ever mass-emailed to an entire corporate staff simultaneously.

Prepare yourself.

You go, girl.

Inception (THIS IS THE REVIEW WITH SPOILERS! THAT MEANS IT HAS SPOILERS!)

2010-07-31T19:24:00.000-04:00

And, since this has spoilers, I am writing here in this first paragraph in the hopes that Facebook, when it simultaneously posts this, will cut the article off before actually revealing anything that I want to "spoil," to people who have not already seen this wonderful, brilliant, thought-provoking film. Just in case you missed it, this is the review that HAS spoilers, which means that I am going to talk quite openly about my interpretation - and my lovely copilot's interpretation - of the meaning of the events in the film, and that's impossible without discussing the events which led each of us to our wildly different conclusions about it.

That said, it is almost impossible to truly spoil this film; there's no twist ending or big surprise that can be given away, because the structure of the film is such that every event has meaning, and yet conclusions cannot be drawn without seeing all of them. You literally cannot "give it away," because the story, and the telling of it, itself will lead the viewer to their own conclusions about it.

I will, however, note that it's really better if you watch this movie without reading this review the first time, so if you haven't seen Inception, please, you deserve to experience it the first time tabula rasa, that is, as a blank slate, upon which the movie can paint with strokes both broad and fine.

So.

-------------------------------------------------------------SPOILERS BEGIN HERE!!!!!-------------------------------------------------------------

Since my copilot and I are two different people, we have different views of the movie; in fact, our theories about it almost directly contradict each other. As this is the case, I am going to present to you both my interpretation of the events in the movie, and hers, insofar as I understand her view of it based on her hastily scrawled notes.

Yes, we took fucking notes. It deserves that.

So: my view, in brief, of this movie as a whole, is that Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is dreaming the entire thing, start-to-finish. Actual events DO get replayed, but only within the context of the dream itself.

The concept of totems is introduced in the movie: a personal item, that only one person in all the world can use, as a token indicating whether the person is, in fact, in reality or dream. In Cobb's case, this is a tiny metal top, which when in dream never stops spinning, but in reality wobbles to a stop after a few seconds.

The problem is that, as the movie later explains, the top was never COBB's item at all; it belongs instead to Cobb's wife Mal, who either died, or simply left the dreamworld.

As such, it doesn't provide Cobb an accurate touchstone for reality; although he uses it as such throughout the movie, it gives him no accurate information; it is a red herring. Cobb, however, relies on it, thus fooling himself into believing things in the dream to be "real," without any reliable sign that they in fact are.

The movie is riddled with events I saw as clues pointing to this conclusion.

Michael Caine, in theory Cobb's father (or Mal's; which is never made clear,) greets Cobb on their first meeting by telling Cobb to wake up, to come back to reality. This is a projection; as discussed in the movie, Cobb's subconscious is trying to warn him that he is in fact NOT in reality, and needs to - literally - wake.

One of the events which is at least ostensibly "real," though past, is Cobb and Mal's trip to limbo; Cobb convinced Mal to leave limbo with him by letting themselves be crushed by a train. Earlier in the movie, before this is revealed, a train thunders through a dream Cobb shares with his team, tearing up the road, literally plowing a path through traffic; this is another subconscious projection, trying to convince Cobb to return to wakefulness.

One of the concepts discussed in the movie is the idea that the subconscious will reject - violently - anything it "knows" to be false. Persistently, throughout the movie, Cobb is pursued; in the "real" world, by faceless corporations, and in the dream world by projections that are universally stronger and more violent than expected; this is because Cobb's own subconscious knows that he is dreaming, and is attempting to reject that dream, and growing more desperate to do so - and thus more violent in its attempts - as it becomes evident Cobb has totally lost track of reality and cannot get back on his own.

Cobb persistently warns others - in this context, all projections of his own subconscious - against using memories to build dreams, because it runs a greater risk of the dreamer losing track of reality, but he himself persistently does so, creating whole cityscapes out of his own experiences.

Mal either died, or left the dreaming state without Cobb; in context of the entire movie being a dream state, Cobb's oft-mentioned and displayed guilt over her "death" is actually the reverse; he is guilty not because she died, but because he let her return to reality alone; he abandoned her in favor of a fantasy carved from his own mind, and is guilty and ashamed for having failed her.

His "triumphant" return to the United States at the end of the movie is an attempt by his subconscious to display the unreality of what's happening to him; it is far too easy for him to return, given his own statements that he is fleeing extradition to the States to stand trial for Mal's death. No matter the power of a giant corporation, it takes more than a single phone call and 20 minutes to get murder charges reversed.

Mal - as a projection of Cobb's subconscious - tells him outright that he is in a dream several times; mentions the pursuit by faceless corporations, comparing that persecution to when projections reject and dismiss things which violate the stability of the dream world.

Cobb misses the kick and is still able to return - because it is his dream, and ultimately he has control of it, and thus is able to switch levels at will.

One of the elements Cobb uses as a demonstration to explain how to detect a dream is the fact that you never start a dream at the beginning; you are always simply in the dream, and things are happening. "How did you get to the cafe?" However, the film opens in exactly this way; Cobb, waking up face down in the surf, with no explanation of his presence.

Cobb uses the top at the end of the movie, and even as the screen goes dark, the top doesn't fall; only wobbles. Even his acceptance of someone else's token is a hint; he KNOWS the totem will not work accurately for him, as it's not his, but trusts it nonetheless because he has chosen to believe it.

In conclusion, going by its own internal logic, my interpretation of the film is that the entire thing, start to finish, is an exploration of a landscape of dream created by Cobb's own mind; there is no objective "reality" in this movie. The only thing of which you can be certain is that there is, in fact, a dreamer.

My lovely copilot disagrees in nearly every detail of my thesis; what follows is her rebuttal, as I am given to understand it. (Honey, when you read this, if I goofed it up, comment and explain. I don't mind editing.)

Her thesis is that the elements and events presented in the movie as "reality" are; that the story progresses as displayed, with a single exception: at the end of the movie, when Cobb ignores the kick to stay in limbo in an attempt to rescue Saito, he then never leaves limbo; from that point, he never wakes up.

To support this, she explains that Michael Caine, in the conversation I mentioned above, is merely telling Cobb to get over his wife's actual death; his choice of language is strictly coincidence.

The top Cobb uses throughout the movie was Mal's totem, true, but after her death, he WAS the only person on earth who would truly know it, and therefore it DID work for Cobb as a reliable indicator of reality or dream. At the end of the film, when it spins without stopping, it is indicating that he is still dreaming, but only that time; all the other times, it worked flawlessly.

The appearance of the train was a manifestation of his subconscious guilt over Mal's death, because it was the way that they "died" together the first time they entered limbo.

The violent events were exactly as portrayed; Cobb was a criminal, and criminals make dangerous enemies for themselves. The violence in the dreamscapes was due to the dreamers' rejection of the changes Cobb and his team brought with them.

She also points out that during the sequence in limbo where Cobb goes to rescue Saito, his "death" is never shown onscreen; there's no evidence that he ever received the "kick" at all, and thus remained in limbo. Even his final confrontation with the vastly aged limbo-Saito never actually ends; it just stops. There's no stimulus whatsoever to bring him out of the dream, and thus everything from that point on remains dream, including his return to the USA and the faces of his children.

And she notes that Mal never shows up during the sequences the movie identifies as "reality," which seems as though it would have been likely if Cobb dreamed it all, given the persistence of her presence within the acknowledged dream states. Her presence within the dream states is a manifestation of Cobb's guilt over her death through his own error.

That last, by the way, is what I feel is the strongest point in favor of her interpretation; Mal is an incredibly pervasive presence in the segments identified as dream, and she didn't show up even once during the putatively "real" segments.

I will note, here, that regardless of which interpretation you agree with, if you do, over 75% of the movie takes place in a dreamscape. I would be interested to see the interpretations of my readers; we can water-cooler this movie to death in my comments. This is an appropriate time for long comments, guys, so feel free. Go wild. Astonish me with your theories.

This is an amazing film from end to end, and like a Moebius strip, twists upon itself, becoming a singularity from which there is no true, real exit; it loops upon itself in its very structure in a recurrence that begs many questions of the audience, and delivers no true answers.

It is what you bring to it - your own perceptions and preconceptions - that give it meaning; it is a perfect mirror for your OWN subconscious.

This is the best movie I've seen in years, and unquestionably one of the most important.

Go see it.

Inception! (SPOILER-FREE REVIEW)

2010-07-31T18:59:00.000-04:00

So.

There's been a looooooot of hype about this movie, largely based on some really creative-looking trailers (including a distinctive, bombastic soundtrack,) and the fact that it was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the same director who brought us Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Insomnia.

Allow me to be the first to tell you that it deserves every tiny little erg of energy anyone has spent telling someone else how awesome a movie it really is.

What a brilliant movie.

My lovely co-pilot and I went and saw it last night, and our discussion of it not only lasted the night, but continued this morning (and at the theater itself, roped in several bystanders who had also just seen it.)

So, spoiler-free, let me tell you what I can about this movie.

The premise is both intriguing and simple: a thief, Dominic Cobb, played to a T by Leonardo DiCaprio, who specializes in stealing information literally from the dreams of his victims, is hired to do the reverse; to plant an idea in the mind of the intended victim, in such a way that the victim believes it to be his own idea, and acts on it accordingly.

But the nature of this film is such that literally everything that happens in the movie is open to interpretation. Reality itself is bent - both figuratively and literally - in the movie in such ways that it is impossible to purely nail down exactly what happened - or didn't - in its story, and as such, this is possibly the greatest water-cooler movie ever.

Since so much of the movie takes place in dreams, things in this film don't necessarily mean what they appear to at first glance, and their significance may be simultaneously more and less than you thought when you became aware of them initially.

...See why this movie is hard to critique? Even were I to lay out the entire series of events in the movie, start to finish, it's almost impossible to "spoil" it, because director Nolan plays a magnificent game of prestidigitation with the audience, alternately hiding things you thought you knew, and displaying other things you didn't understand as established facts.

Watching this film is like a fever dream; it makes sense, but only within itself; and yet its greater importance is that it demands so much of the audience. You cannot watch this movie and walk away unaffected; you may not like it, but it forces you to think about the implications of its message - and the meaning, ultimately, of that message itself.

I am very picky when it comes to paying ten bucks a head to go to the theater; a lot of times I choose to watch even big-name movies at home.

But this movie deserves the broad canvas of the big screen, guys.

It doesn't need 3D; it doesn't need cheap tricks to hold your interest.

As a whole, its artistry of filmmaking performs an endless sleight of hand upon you, and transforms what, in the hands of a lesser director, could have been disappointing, into a pinnacle of the art of film; this is what movies should be like.

Christopher Nolan is legit, guys. This was the best movie I've seen in years. It belongs on everyone's DVD shelf.

Lime-Pepper Fajita Time!

2010-07-14T14:58:00.000-04:00

As a treat for my lovely fellow chef, I decided to whip up some homemade Southwest food last night; no surprise there.

So, having made that decision, I settled on fajitas.

I will note here that fajitas are supposed to be flank steak; I couldn't find any on my excursion to the grocery, so I settled on chuck steak instead, but for the record flank steak is better for this.

So, I collected a bunch of stuff, all of which will get organized by recipe (there are two, and a trick. You'll see.)

First, I cut two good-sized chuck steaks into short strips. This came out to maybe a pound and a half of strips - half inch thick by around four inches long.

I took two gallon freezer bags, and put one inside the other - you can use one, but two reduces the chances of leaks. (This is my Secret Ninja Master Meat Marination trick, so pay attention.)

When you're marinating meat, there are a lot of ways to go about it, but the technique that's always worked for me is to put the meat into the inner bag, and put the marinade in with it; make sure all the air is out, and then you can knead the meat with the marinade several times during the marinating time without getting your hands all sloppy. This way you reduce the amount of marinade needed, and it works it into the meat more deeply, than any way I've ever found to do this.

So, first the marinade:

Chopped cilantro (get one bundle for this meal, and use about a quarter of it here; the rest you will use in two other dishes.)

Olive oil (1 part per...)

White wine vinegar (...two parts of this.)

Lime juice (If you get one of those little green plastic limes, use about a third here; the rest will go in the aforementioned other two dishes.)

Ground cumin

Chili powder

Black pepper

Minced garlic

As an aside here, when making pico de gallo (one of those two dishes,) I cut up a pepper; I put a few - only a few - of the seeds in with the meat and marinade to give it a bit of kick. I used enough oil and vinegar to roughly cover the meat 2/3 of the way. Spices can be to taste, but be generous, since this is the bulk of the fajita flavor, right here.

Once the steak strips and the marinade were combined in the inner bag, I made sure the air was all squeezed out, then sealed the inner bag, and repeated the process with the outer bag, and sealed that, then kneaded the meat for ~2 minutes or so, and then set it in the fridge. I'm not going to annotate, here, but during the preparation of the rest of the meal, I took the meat out and kneaded it several times, maybe every half hour, to ensure the spices and flavors were really worked into the meat.

Now, to complete setup for the fajitas themselves, I cut one red and one yellow bell pepper into strips a little more generous than the meat, and sliced out one half of a Vidalia onion so that there would be mixed vegetables. I set those aside in a covered dish (there are cats here,) and turned my attention to the pico de gallo.

I will pause here for a brief note before I begin the pico recipe to digress about peppers.

There are a ton of different peppers you can use for any dish, and it pays to know the flavors and heat levels for them.

For pico de gallo, it's supposed to be hot, but know your audience.

Poblano peppers are very mild; they're also huge. I diced mayyyyybe a third of one for the pico de gallo I made last night; for a hotter flavor, I prefer serrano peppers to jalapenos, simply because - though slightly hotter - they have a much richer flavor. I am not a huge fan of jalapeno peppers' actual flavor.

If you're really crazy, you can use habaneros, but you and I will be the only ones eating it, most likely.

So.

For pico de gallo, you'll need:

The other half of the previously mentioned Vidalia onion, diced;

Your chosen pepper, diced (WITHOUT the seeds;)

Tomatoes or tomatillos diced in approximately the same quantity as the onion (two good sized tomatoes will come out to about the same as the one-half onion if you get big onions;)

Finely chopped cilantro - roughly half what you have left of your bundle;

Roughly a tablespoon of minced garlic;

Half the remaining lime juice;

And some more white wine vinegar. (Quantity dependent on other factors, see below.)

Put the diced vegetables and peppers in a dish you can cover, and add the cilantro and lime juice. Stir this to make sure the garlic and cilantro are pretty evenly distributed, and then add enough vinegar to cover your vegetables.

Cover the dish, and put it in the fridge.

Next, I made fresh guacamole.

I've posted that recipe before, so I won't repeat myself, but you can use any remaining lime juice, and the rest of the cilantro, in the guacamole.

Put that in the fridge too.

Now, when you're ready to actually start the cooking - the guacamole and pico de gallo need about an hour in the fridge to really soak up the flavors - get yourself a good, high-sided frying pan. A pretty big one.

Put a couple of tablespoons of oil in the pan, on high heat, and lightly sear your vegetables - the onion and pepper strips; don't burn them to a crisp, but if they get a bit blackened, it's fine.

Once the vegetables are done, take them out of the pan, and put in the meat, marinade and all, lower the heat a bit, and let it cook until the meat is nicely browned.

Once the meat is browned, add about 1/4 cup of water, and let it cook down around the meat until you're back to the original volume of liquid, then toss the vegetables back in, stir it around for a minute or two, and you're done.

To serve the pico de gallo, drain off the vinegar mix and serve the pico de gallo "dry." If you make enough for an army, and you know you're going to have some left, you can keep the vinegar mix and put any leftover pico back in it to store overnight.

I served this with sour cream, shredded cheese, and warmed tortillas.

As a note, for those of you who don't have your own tortilla press or a steamer, the field expedient way of making those restaurant-style steamed tortillas is to take two sets of 4-5 paper plates; put a wet paper towel - wet, not dripping - one one set, put your tortillas (maybe 10 at a time but no more) on the towel, put another wet paper towel on top of them, and cover with the other set of plates. Microwave them for 90 seconds and like magic, steamed tortillas.

At any rate, this is a flavorful (and colorful!) dinner; the preparation takes a while, but the gustatory delight once you're done is worth every bit of it.

Enjoy!

...As a final note, here are the commonly used peppers ranked by heat from lowest to highest:

Poblano (the Ancho is the dried version) 500-2500 Scoville units of heat

Jalapeno (the Chipotle is the smoked, dried version) 2500-8000 Scoville units of heat

Serrano 10000-23000 Scoville units of heat

Cayenne 30000-50000 Scoville units of heat

Piquin 50000-100000 Scoville units of heat

Habanero 100000-350000 Scoville units of heat

And for the insane...

Naga Jolokia 855000-1075000 Scoville units of heat.

For a comparison, police-grade pepper spray is about 5 million Scoville units, and pure capsaicin is about 16 million.

WASH YOUR HANDS after cutting peppers; if you rub your eyes with pepper juice you will regret it, and habanero juice will make your hands feel like they're under a blowtorch for days afterwards if you don't wash it off with grease-cutting soap.

Just so you know.

Surprising No-One, I Want To Rant (And At Some Length, Too.)

2010-07-06T22:49:00.000-04:00

This time, about gaming.

You guys have heard me talk about gaming before, if you've been following this blog for any length of time.

Trust me, and read along, and I will try to hold your interest here; this isn't going to go the direction you may think.

Blizzard Entertainment, the owners and operators of the world's most popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, have decided that their online forums are a seething cesspit of trolls, spammers, and stalkers.

They're right.

Now, a sane and rational gaming company would respond to this by hiring people to moderate the forums, to ban trolls and spammers, and respond to harassment proactively and visibly, as has been done in every online forum of significance for years.

Blizzard, sadly, is not that company.

See, Blizzard has an investment to protect, which we'll talk about in a bit.

And because of that soon-to-be-discussed-at-exhaustive-length investment, they have no urge to spend a penny more than they have to on policing their own forums.

And they don't want the risks historically associated with taking player volunteers as moderators.

So, they've decided to link players' forum accounts with their game accounts - one forum account per game account - and publish all forum posts, starting with the release of their upcoming expansion pack, with players' real names. (Bonus points for them getting 48 pages - as of this posting - of complaints from players in that thread.)

Go back and read that again.

They're going to post every single player's real, actual name - from the billing records - in a publicly accessible web forum.

Now, in addition to the obvious (to men) danger of identity theft associated with this kind of move, there is the increased risk to female players from harassers and potential rapists; the risk of employers finding out that their employees play World of Warcraft in their off time and responding with some sort of harassment of their own; unwelcome family members, annoying coworkers...

...A thousand, thousand times worse than Facebook.

Now, I said they have an investment to protect, so let's talk about that.

See, World of Warcraft - unlike Guild Wars, which point we'll return to in a minute - charges a subscription fee.

Every month, anyone who wants to play World of Warcraft has to send in a little bit of cash to keep their account active.

The cheapest level of subscription - if you buy 6 months at a time - is $12.99 a month.

Many players register multiple accounts, but let's go by Blizzard's numbers for this.

According to the numbers in December 2008, World of Warcraft has 11.5 million subscribers.

Hold that thought.

Blizzard explains the subscription fee by saying that "The fee is used to support the costs associated with the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."

I'm sure it does.

But I'm also sure they're making a tidy profit on it, too.

So let's see how tidy, shall we?

11,500,000 subscribers times (at the cheapest tier of subscription; many pay up to $14.99 a month) $12.99, is $149,385,000.

Look at that number again.

I am one hundred percent certain that there is no possible way Blizzard spends a hundred and fifty million dollars a MONTH on "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."

Let's play with numbers some more, shall we?

Blizzard makes - $149,385,000 per month times twelve months - $1,792,620,000 a year in revenue from this game. For the fees to be justified, they would have to produce the entire Lord of the Rings movie trilogy each year.

Even allowing them a semi-sane and reasonable profit - say, 40% - they're still looking at an operating budget of $717,048,000 per year.

I'm pretty sure they don't produce or supply anything that requires seven hundred million dollars a year, which means that their actual profit margin is way, way higher than 40%.

Bear in mind, I am only counting the subscription fees, and making the totally unwarranted assumption here that all the subscribers use the cheapest tier of subscription.

But there's more to the mix; Blizzard also allows for a huge spectrum of items, privileges, and abilities to be purchased with cash for use in the game world.

That revenue is totally unaccounted for here.

So let's use my patented method of guesstimation, here.

Assume that only 10% of the people who play World of Warcraft ever actually buy anything with cash outside of their subscription fees.

Make the further assumption that each of those people buys one item per year, for $10.

You and I both know that it's more than 10% of the players, and they buy way more than one item per year.

But even given those assumptions, that's an additional $15,000,000 a year that Blizzard has coming in, bringing their operating budget to a little over $730,000,000.

You might object here, and point out that the number I used for the subscriber base is old; that's fair, but doesn't really affect this.

Why? Because the primary cost, once development is complete, of operating an online game, is the bandwidth necessary to transmit the data back and forth to the players; if the numbers of subscribers grow, their subscription fees directly offset those costs, and if the numbers of subscribers fall, they use less bandwidth, and therefore the costs drop.

So.

Blizzard has to make a buck; they are apparently making plenty, but they cannot afford to hire moderators, and must therefore subject their entire player base - eleven million people - to an increased risk of identity theft, stalking, harassment both on and offline, and potentially violence.

How much WOULD it cost them to moderate the forums, anyway?

Taking a page from the service industry as a whole, let's start off by assuming they hire every moderator at part-time, and therefore don't have to give them benefits in the form of any compensation other than an hourly wage; but because dealing with trolls, flamers, spammers, and harassment claims all day is stressful, let's say they're generous and pay the moderators $20 per hour to police the forums.

They'd need at least a thousand moderators (not really, less than a hundred would be more than adequate, but I am trying to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt in every way I can, here,) for 32 hours per week.

So, that's 32,000 hours per week at $20 per hour; $640,000 a week for forum moderators.

Outlandish!

Crazy!

Why, that adds up to $2,560,000 a month in payroll for the moderators alone, or a total of $30,720,000 a year - just for forum moderators!

Insane!

Unprecedented!

That only leaves them...

$700,000,000 a year to pay for "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft," without affecting their profits one tiny bit.

...Whoa, there.

That's right; in exchange for the expense - which is small enough that even if it's wildly exaggerated (a hundred moderators at a much more believable $12 per hour adds out to $1,843,200 a year, a number so small as to be unnoticeable in a 730 MILLION DOLLAR budget) it's hardly significant - Blizzard has decided to place their entire player base in direct physical and emotional danger.

Great job!

This is necessary, of course, because of "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."

Guild Wars, on the other hand, can be had for the low, low price of $40 - for all three campaigns and the single expansion pack.

And then you never have to pay them another penny.

You CAN, of course, if you really want to; they do a tidy business selling all kinds of little perks and extras in the game, and I'm sure it's a pretty good source of revenue for ArenaNet (the makers of Guild Wars.)

So much so, that based off their profits from the development, maintenance, and operation of Guild Wars, they're developing a sequel.

Without ever charging a subscription fee.

The sequel won't, either.

And yet somehow, for Blizzard, $149,385,000 a MONTH is required for "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft."

Let's see how that stacks up, shall we?

$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)

By contrast, $0 a month buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from Guild Wars.)

$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)

By contrast, $0 a month buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from Guild Wars.)

$149,385,000 a month, minus profits - $730,000,000 a year - buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from World of Warcraft.)

By contrast, $0 a month buys this. (Link goes to full-size screenshot from Guild Wars.)

Y'all poor Blizzard kiddies are getting raped to a fare-thee-well.

So, I'd think, having given examples - in matching resolutions as far as was possible, to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt everywhere possible - that we've established that they're not spending $149,385,000 a month on "the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that go into World of Warcraft," especially if ArenaNet can provide almost exactly the same thing for (errrrr...) $0 a month.

So what ARE they spending it on?

Well, this:

MTV Shows

That's right.

Those subscription fees are going so Blizzard Entertainment can have a twelve-foot statue of an Orc Warrior on a wolf.

Because fuck your privacy, and your safety.

They gotta have their basketball court and a FUCKING TWELVE FOOT TALL STATUE OF AN ORC WARRIOR ON A WOLF.

Have fun with the spam you get after your REAL NAME and REAL EMAIL ADDRESS are discovered by spammers, after you make a single post in the Blizzard forums, guys.

Or...

...Wait...

Maybe you could NOT POST THERE ANYMORE?

Because then, well...

...Blizzard won't have to pay for customer support at all.

And then they could have TWO twelve foot tall statues of an Orc Warrior on a wolf!

The SECOND Best Movie Review You Will Ever Read From Me

2010-06-24T21:22:00.000-04:00

I want to start this off by saying that I rarely go all full-fanboy over a movie; you may have noticed that I don't post really positive reviews all THAT often.

I am about to.

I am also going to start off with some technical notes about the movie in question.

So.

This weekend, my lovely copilot and I went to see Toy Story 3, having heard reviewers (except that one douchebag) wax rhapsodic about its many virtues.

The very first thing I noticed was something I wasn't expecting; the 3D was done RIGHT.

OK, technical note #1: 3D, as a filmmaking technique, is and should be an enhancement to the movie, but the movie should still sell its story based on the STORY; all 3D is supposed to do is make the movie more immersive.

One huge flaw in most 3D movies is that filmmakers - ever since good ol' House Of Wax, and that infamous paddle-ball scene - have used it for its own sake; "OMG, there's something flying RIGHT AT MY FACE!"

Over, and over, and over.

Really, if I want to see that, I can go sit on the third base foul line at a Twins game. It's not an enhancement to the movie; it just annoys me.

Pixar, however, seems to understand my grievance there, and the 3D in Toy Story 3 is absolutely stellar; both in quality AND in usage, adding depth and feeling to the movie without being distracting.

As a second technical note, Pixar has come a long, long way; the animation is fluid, and I never saw any errors - something I spot in almost every film, computer-generated or otherwise. By comparison, the original Toy Story - which was a great movie in its own right - looks, technically speaking, like amateur hour.

So, the big question; how IS the movie?

I will answer briefly, and then expound at some length.

This is the best movie so far this year.

Based on the movies released thus far, Toy Story 3 is a shoo-in for Best Picture. Of course, they will fob Best Animated Feature on it, and give Best Picture to something political about Iraq and how war sucks, the way they gave Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Best Foreign Film and gave Best Picture to traffic. (WTF?!)

Why is it so excellent?

Well, Pixar has finally figured out how to do something nearly miraculous; they created a (second!) sequel that not only surpasses the original, but outright blows it away.

That's not exactly a reason, but play along with me here.

The story in Toy Story 3 is one almost anyone can identify with; who hasn't had a moment when one of their friends does something that seems to be a complete about-face, a total betrayal of your loyalty and steadfastness?

The premise is simple: the toys' owner, the rarely-glimpsed Andy, has finally grown up enough that he's going off to college, and his toys are getting packed up for storage in the attic. This is not such a bad deal for the toys, until Andy's mom mistakes the bag of toys for a trash bag, and hauls them out to the curb.

The toys, understandably miffed by this betrayal, contrive to get themselves donated to a daycare, with the notion in mind that they will be played with, and therefore happy.

Unfortunately, the daycare is Efrafra, straight out of Watership Down, run by an innocent-seeming but tyrannical and possibly psychotic stuffed bear named General Woundwort Lotso.

Woody, the ever-heroic sheriff and nominal leader of the motley collection of toys, tries desperately to both break them out, and convince them that in fact Andy was trying to store them in the attic, and their anger is misdirected.

There are tons of references and asides for adults, as is becoming a hallmark (and a well-appreciated one) of Pixar films, and there are jokes that will be comical for all ages (on different levels, of course.)

Watching Buzz Lightyear in Spanish mode was both hilarious and strangely awesome.

There are some very effective cliffhangers, both figurative and literal, and the kind of sentimentality Pixar is learning to manage so well, in which you care without it being either maudlin or overly cheesy.

Unlike Up, in which the opening feels like getting punched in the kidneys with depression while simultaneously stubbing a pack of lit cigarettes out on your pancreas (and I LIKE that movie,) Toy Story 3 manages that ever-so-delicate tightrope walk of making you invest in the characters and the situation emotionally without making it obvious that they're doing exactly that.

When combined with some really creepy villains, and the advent of the unbelievably fabulous (and I use that word advisedly) Ken doll, it makes for a movie that I can actually call "an experience."

Interestingly, Pizar set up another sequel with such delicacy that I actually didn't realize that they had done so until I sat down to write this.

But overall, what I have to say about this movie is simple.

See it.

See it in 3D if you can.

It is the best movie so far this year, but it is also far and away the best film Pixar has ever made; if you don't see it, you are missing a great moviegoing experience.

This is a wonderful movie, and except for that one douchebag in New York, for once the mob got it right: this movie gets a perfect score.

I Am Right Again, As Usual.

2010-06-24T20:56:00.000-04:00

I have ranted several times in people's comments - notably Shadowwarrior's - about the various means BP could be using to clean up the spill, while they try to stop the flow without caving in the seafloor and freeing the entire 11 billion barrel deposit into the ocean. (That would be bad.)

One of the things I said was that maybe they should try Kevin Costner's Ocean Therapy machine.

Yo, my win-loss percentage is going up steadily, y'all.

BP bought and tested 32 of them and they are now building barges to filter the oil out of the seawater; they are currently estimating 128,000 barrels per day in cleaning capacity.

That's awesome.

Of course, it would have been more awesome if they had started on that project in, say, late April after the rig sank, but hey.

At any rate, here ya go:

Bringing the awesome.

Hey, Kev, I officially forgive you for The Postman.

And While I'm At It, Jon Stewart Nails It Exactly - And Even If You Hate Him You Should Watch It.

2010-06-18T20:05:00.000-04:00

Hat Tip to Kepler1 for finding this one.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

An Energy-Independent Future

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

More Editorializing, Just Because

2010-06-18T19:09:00.000-04:00

One of the things that invariably grinds my gears about the state budgets is hearing people bitch and complain about the government employee pension funds.

It also grinds my gears when I hear people in the private sector do it, but there's not nearly as much complaining from the private sector people.

That fact in and of itself annoys me.

Oh, don't worry, I will explain all about it, in such exhaustive detail that you will no doubt be tired of my blather before I get done and looking for a slushee.

See, here's the first problem.

Who, I'm asking you, who, ever, told government employees that they had a ticket for life because they worked for the government for a few years?

The reason pension funds for government employees are underfunded is because there is not enough money to fill them. It's nice to claim that there wouldn't be these problems IF they were fully funded, but the bottom-line issue is that they CANNOT BE fully funded.

Want to know why?

Because in a lot of cases, we hand out lifetime pensions and medical benefits to people who work for the government for 20 years.

That sounds like a bunch, doesn't it?

Twenty whole years.

Say you get hired as a public works superintendent right out of college, diploma fresh in your hand and still warm from the press. You're 25, maybe 26; you work in that position for 20 years, maybe even making a real contribution.

Then you retire.

At 45.

And live to be 90.

That means that in exchange for your twenty years of hard work, the taxpayer picks up your tab for the next 45 years - and in a lot of cases, when you die, your spouse and kids can sue to keep the gravy train rolling.

Now, ok, maybe a public service pension won't keep you in a McMansion - although it sure seems to in California and New York - but goddamn, 45 years of pay for 20 years of work?

And meanwhile, the retirees keep rolling in. At every turn, states are faced with ever-increasing pension rolls, people who are contributing nothing, and are drawing in some cases their original full-time base pay.

And they outnumber the number of people who are paying into those plans.

They cannot be fully funded - it is inherently impossible - because they are a giant Ponzi scheme.

They just chucked some guy in jail for running one of those; Bernie Madoff, ever hear of him?

So why is it wrong for him to bilk private investors out of their hard-earned money with that scheme, but fine when the City of Los Angeles does it?

...Because L.A. is doing it to the taxpayers.

Now, far be it from me to offer criticism without a suggestion, so, here goes.

This is how to fix pension plans so that they first make sense, and second, don't screw anyone.

Begin with the notion, first, that compensation for your labor ends when your labor ends; there is no moral justification for claiming you have a "right" to still draw pay after you leave your job, regardless of your reason for bailing out.

There are those who will claim that the pension deals are "part of their compensation and they have a right to it because the state(s) agreed to those terms."

That's not strictly true.

See, the teachers, nurses, firefighters, police, and every bureaucrat who ever scuttled sideways to hide back under the rock you just turned over, are all members of unions.

And the unions, for decades, have given the state governments an ultimatum, every single year: increase the benefits, or we strike - and your state gets shut down.

There is no negotiation in good faith, when your options are "do it my way or get irrevocably fucked."

So the states have agreed under duress to incredibly onerous terms to keep their own employees at work - if you can call what a lot of the bureaucracy does work - and the result - the bill - is coming due.

Public servants have no right to unionize.

That is a fact; they have no right to strike, when they are paid from the taxpayers' pockets.

They have no right to demand more from the government - that means you and I - because they volunteered for that job.

If they don't like the pay and benefits the taxpayer offers them, they have every right to quit. And form their own company to do the same identical thing that they were doing before, and bid on a contract to provide the service.

But they don't have a right to demand that the private sector pay them more than they're worth.

And they unquestionably do; public sector jobs AVERAGE 35% more compensation than equivalent civilian jobs, now.

Which means their jobs are not worth that much, because if they WERE worth that much, someone in the private sector would be paying them that much already.

So.

Retirement is a legitimate benefit; being able to retire is a perfectly legitimate desire on the part of the worker.

But this isn't how to go about it.

The way it SHOULD BE done, is for the government to either get together with the banks to develop a financial vehicle - or simply issue it themselves - that functions similarly to a CD.

As the employee works away in their job, they contribute some portion of their pay into the account; AS PART OF THEIR COMPENSATION, the government matches the funds they contribute.

When they stop working, those matching funds stop coming, for good.

At that point, the retiree has the option to withdraw their money all at once, or get a stipend. If they have done well, and planned well, then their stipend will come out to be a good portion of their original pay rate, even if the financial vehicle in question is set at a measly rate of compound interest and acts like a savings account - the primary difference being that the funds are inaccessible until the termination of their employment for whatever reason.

It is a fixed amount of funds when they quit; if they want to live like kings, they can piss it all away - and many no doubt will.

That is not the fault either of their employer or of the taxpayer.

If they live frugally, they might very well leave a good chunk of it to their heirs - and they can, because when they retire, everything in that account is theirs - but that's all they get.

It is neither the moral responsibility, or even desirable, that the government, in any persona, should make your decisions from birth until death on the premise that you might fuck up.

Taking the chance that you might fuck up, and learning to deal with the consequences of your decisions, is part of being an adult.

I guess what I mean to say is, if you want a government job because you know the pension plan will hold your hand from the moment you start until it trades you out to the icy fingers of Old Scratch, you are a perpetual adolescent; unable to learn, or take, responsibility - and less of a person because of it.

You don't have a right to ask the government to hold your hand until you die, because the government doesn't do anything; the taxpayer does, and you don't have a right to - using the threat of a strike - force ME to take care of YOU forever.

It is not, and cannot be, moral to force others to give you their livelihoods.

That's what the pension riders are doing; they are, explicitly, stealing from the American public.

It is financially insupportable, as California is now finding out.

It is morally reprehensible.

It is theft; perhaps legal, but theft nonetheless.

For the Christian crowd, I'm gonna wow you with Biblical knowledge: Thou shalt not steal.

Thus saith the Lord.

Also, thus saith any human being, who in their boundless capacity for reason, is capable of comprehending the nature of inherent rights; that the right to your life - and thus freedom to maintain it - is the paramount, most fundamental, right that a human being can have; stealing the means of maintaining that life is murder.

Thou shalt not murder. (KJB notwithstanding, that's the accurate translation. Hebrew, yo, holographic language.)

You have no right to threaten me with crime waves, hospital shutdowns, dumber kids than we have already, and raging fires, to force me to choose between death - murder - and "almost as bad as death but not quite."

Pension plans, as they are currently structured, are morally wrong.

They should be ended as an American institution, and recognized for the communist idea they really are; income redistribution - but only to the people on the approved list.

Thank you for reading.

A Total Pointless And Really Nerdy Digression About Firearms

2010-06-15T12:02:00.000-04:00

I want to start off saying something that might surprise you.

"I hate Mythbusters."

You'd think, considering I am a huge nerd, that I'd love that show, right?

My problem here is that they all too often DON'T do experiments in a way that scientifically proves OR disproves their hypothesis, and then they present their actions as "proof" that something is true or false.

Considering, you know, they're Mythbusters, people who are unable to think through things themselves often then consider them an authority on things.

Now, this came up as part of an article on a completely unrelated site, and my nerd fury was aroused beyond my powers of self-control by seeing one really, really stupid thing that I see - often - when people talk about firearms on the internet.

That being, "proof" that a bullet cannot cause a body to go flying, as they so often do in Hollywood.

Almost inevitably, someone discussing this will cite Newton's Third Law - for every action, there is a reaction - as proof that a bullet can't do that without also sending the shooter flying.

Those people failed physics in high school.

They also frequently cite Mythbusters episodes 25 and 38, in which the Mythbusters "proved" that a bullet wouldn't make a body go flying on impact.

Now, I grant that Hollywood exaggerates this; but the problem with both the failed physics students and the Mythbusters, here, is that any hunter can tell you that this is bullshit and a round from a hunting rifle will knock a full-grown deer ass over teakettle if you hit it in the shoulder.

Errr, sorta like what happens if you shoot a human.

So, how did the Mythbusters "prove" this wrong, if it isn't, and how did the failed physics students manage their dismal grades?

Let me break the several factors down one at a time.

First, let's dispel the myth about Newton's Third Law.

When you fire a weapon, the energy the bullet has at impact isn't imparted to it instantaneously; the gun doesn't shoot bullets by magic, and it doesn't use teleportation. When a round is fired, the gunpowder in the cartridge is ignited; it burns very quickly, creating a moving wavefront of expanding hot gas. This wavefront pushes the bullet, accelerating it down the barrel at ever-increasing speed; the acceleration ends when the bullet exits the barrel and the gas disperses (that's the "muzzle flash") and the bullet then travels to its target at the speed (this is the "muzzle velocity") imparted to it by its time in the barrel.

What this means is that the shooter in fact DOES absorb most of the energy the bullet takes with it; but the shooter absorbs it as a steady (if brief) push, rather than an impact. (Although, if the firearm is big enough and there's enough recoil to be had, this doesn't matter, as witness this video of an inexperienced shooter getting knocked in the forehead by his scope while firing a .50 caliber rifle.)

I say most, because most firearms have both recoil-dampening springs and other such devices, they also typically vent some amount of the gas in a direction that is safe for the shooter but opposing the direction of bullet travel; say, down, or to the sides. This cushions the recoil for the shooter even more, without removing the force from the bullet.

Now, that said, what happens when the bullet hits the target?

Instantaneous impact. All the kinetic energy carried by the bullet is imparted to the target instantly. Now, this can take two forms: either the bullet remains within the target - as in a bone hit on a deer - in which case the target goes flying, or the bullet blows clean through the target, in which case it carries most of its kinetic energy away with it, causing damage through hydrostatic shock.

Right. So what makes that crucial difference? Two factors: first, the sheer quantity of kinetic force imparted to the bullet by the firearm - primarily a function of barrel length thanks to the longer acceleration time - and second, the type of bullet itself.

A rifle imparts far more kinetic force to a bullet than does a pistol of any variety; you can test this at home, if you're so determined, by using both a rifle and pistol chambered for .22 long rifle ammunition, and firing both at a target. the pistol will impart much more force to the target as target motion, and the rifle will blow nice, deadly (though little) holes right on through it - thanks to the barrel length.

The bullet matters as well; a "jacketed" round, for those of you who care but don't know, is a lead slug physically wrapped in a harder metal, like steel or copper, so that the bullet doesn't expand when it hits the target; the specific purpose of a jacketed slug is to increase target pass-through. In other words, the ammunition is specifically designed to KILL the target, by plowing great honking holes through it, as opposed to knocking it down (what's called "stopping power.")

For "stopping power," - in other words, the power to make your target do cool backflips - you use hollowpoint or frangible bullets, which are designed to expand when they hit a target, thus imparting all their energy to the target and NOT flying on through to hit innocent bystanders.

Now, you may be wondering, where does Mythbusters come into all this?

In both episodes, they used rifles to fire jacketed rounds at targets, then claimed that this proved that the bullets had insufficient(?!) force to knock the targets down.

Howinthehell did the bullets blow all the way through the targets, then?

In order for their experiments to have been accurate, they should have tried both rifles and pistols, in several different calibers, with both hollowpoint and jacketed ammunition.

What they would have discovered is that the slower, lower-powered rounds were far more likely to actually send a target flying, while the faster, high-powered rounds would blow right through the targets with ease.

I am totally unable to comprehend how someone can seriously misunderstand physics to an extent that allows them to proudly display a fucking car door with bullet holes that go all the way through it and still claim that a bullet doesn't carry enough energy to knock down a human.

Here, I'll show you an easy way to prove those people to be idiots: hit them with the car door. I guarantee they fall down, and are far more damaged than the door.

If something can blow holes through steel, guys, it can blow holes through you. Using armor-piercing ammunition specifically designed to GO THROUGH FUCKING ARMOR - not to knock you down, but to pierce the target - to attempt to prove that bullets can't knock you down is goddamned retarded.

Also, Mythbusters fails 10th grade physics.

Sometimes, Dammit, I Hate Being Right.

2010-06-08T11:16:00.000-04:00

[A note: all picture captions in this article are also links to further documentation. Feel free to click and explore.]

OK. I'm pretty sure we all agree that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an immense disaster, the scope of which boggles the mind. (Pictured: Obama golfing, April 23rd, 2010.)

But I'm also sure some of you have been reading my articles alleging a cover-up with at least some degree of skepticism, as I have been known to theorize about things that - while strictly theory - are interesting to me as intellectual exercise.

So, let me ask you: is it merely theorizing, merely intellectual exercise, when I say that BP and the government have been covering up the magnitude of the disaster unfolding under the Gulf all along? (Pictured: Obama golfing, April 24th, 2010.)

Is it?

Is it REALLY?

I'm not alone in thinking of government collusion; OilPrice.com posted an article alleging the same thing over a month ago. But without supporting documentation, without much in the way of confirmatory linkage, their claims were easy, no doubt, for the government faithful to dismiss.

Does the fact that Rahm Emanuel's rent-free apartment in Washington, DC is owned by a BP adviser and lobbyist, whose firm was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by a committee headed by Rahm Emanuel, make anyone suspicious? (Pictured: Obama golfing, May 8th, 2010.)

Because it should.

If it's true, right?

I mean, that kind of obvious conflict of interest can't possibly be true, right?

Right?

Except that kind of back-room deal has been a hallmark of this government. (Pictured: Obama golfing, May 11th, 2010.)

Except that this kind of thing appears to be business as usual for the Obama administration. (Think Sestak.)

So, here we are, approaching the 50th day of oil spilling into the Gulf, with no end in sight, and oil plumes - those underwater formations of undispersed oil that BP CEO Tony Hayward says don't exist - are now being found as far as 142 miles from the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Echoing the arguments used to prevent domestic drilling - "it won't be ready soon, so let's not start it, that way it will never be ready" - the government is insisting that my idea, that of using empty tanker ships to vacuum the oil out of the ocean, cannot be used because the ships aren't ready. Why aren't they ready? They've had almost two months; the answer is because they thought it would take too long to get ready, and therefore never started the process of getting them ready, thus ensuring that they would never be ready. (Pictured: Obama golfing, May 15th, 2010.)

So why?

Why is this government so paralyzed in this crisis?

The answer is simple.

One of the Obama Administration's mantras has been, "never let a good crisis go to waste."

This is, by any standard, a good crisis. (Pictured: Obama golfing, May 16th, 2010.)

And it's one that involves the oil industry, one of leftists' pet bugaboos.

Which means that - as with shootings followed by attempts at new gun control laws - there's an opportunity here for massive parts of the leftist agenda, namely, Cap And Trade, and the nationalization of the oil companies, to gain public traction, something they were unable to achieve before.

That's analysis, and opinion, as yet; don't worry, as soon as they (in my view inevitably) start making moves towards those goals, I will post documentation.

But what other real reason could the government have to try to cover up the scope of the spill? Surely not to make it a far more terrifying scenario when the actual extent of the damage is finally made public, so as to more easily scare the public into compliance with their "regrettably necessary" measures? (Pictured: Obama golfing, May 22nd, 2010.)

Oh, wait, let me back up.

You're still not convinced the government has been covering anything up, are you.

Does this help?

BP released video to the federal government showing not one, but three leaks, one far more massive than either of the others, weeks ago. (Pictured: Obama fundraising for DNC, April 29th, 2010.)

And yet, despite that information being available to the government all along, the video that's made it to the news has been that one little broken pipe, which even so displayed that the "official" 5,000 barrels per day figure simply could not be accurate.

Why?

What purpose does it serve to tell the public that everything's fine, when it clearly isn't?

Especially when there's a convenient scapegoat - BP - right there, just begging to get beaten for their malfeasance?

Unless you ARE planning to nationalize BP.

I remember something... wait, what WAS it... about wanting to nationalize the oil companies some time back... Some Californian... Congresscritter...

Oh, right, Maxine Waters!

See, this has been their plan for years and years; the oil companies make boatloads of money, and what better way to bankroll your communism than to nationalize the oil companies and have all those boatloads of money to do it?

In fact, Presidential adviser and former Clinton-era Secretary of Labor Robert Reich just wrote a column last week advocating exactly that. (Pictured: Obama has time for the Correspondents' Dinner, May 2, 2010.)

Nationalize the company, then Obama can stop the leak using his Magic President Powers, instead of doing what I have been advocating.

My solution would be two-fold; first, ignore the nay-sayers, ready the tankers for oil removal - since it has been tried before and worked just fine - and have them go vacuum up the oil and carry it away. (Instant cleanup.) Stop delaying - every delay merely makes it worse - and DO IT.

Second, since BP is at fault here - clearly - and thus responsible legally for the costs of both cleanup and repair to the site already, the President should request - note that word, which is different from "demand," the assistance of the American oil companies, and require BP as part of its legal liability to pay the other companies for their assistance in capping the leak. (Pictured: Obama meets with Bono, April 30th, 2010.)

Neither of those elements is unworkable; in fact, BP is in far greater danger than they seem to realize, since the $75 million cap on damages that seems to be keeping them from panic doesn't apply if it turns out that they violated safety regulations, which has ALREADY been proven and documented. This fact could simply drive BP into receivership; without a cap on damages of some kind, a jury is likely to award the plaintiffs, who will likely include the State of Louisiana and the federal government, the sun, moon, and stars by way of compensation.

Meanwhile, Obama admits to a press conference that he - and the federal government - knew this was going to be a major disaster from day one.

Really?

Then why did you go golfing, hmmm? SEVEN TIMES since the Deepwater Horizon blew up.

Why did it take you a month to go even take a look at the situation down there yourself? (Pictured: Obama finally goes to Louisiana, May 2, 2010.)

Because he's busily not wasting the crisis, of course. This is a great time for golf, since everyone else is at work, worried about the results and ramifications of this catastrophe; this is a great time for Obama to have the links to himself.

Today

2010-06-07T10:48:00.000-04:00

There's only really one thing I can say about it.

Geeeeeeettttt Uuuuussssseeeeeeddddddd TTTooooooooo Iiiiiiiiitttttttttttt...

2010-06-01T22:36:00.000-04:00

...Because BP announced today that they have officially given up on any means of capping the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and are simply going to let it gush until they finish the relief wells in August.

AUGUST!!!

Good luck going to eat at a seafood joint anytime soon, guys.

Wonder what excuse Obama's going to use to cover his ass after insisting that they be left in charge in the first place?

You Know...

2010-06-01T12:34:00.000-04:00

I am not a fan of Michael Cera.

For those of you wondering what I'm blathering about, or wondering who Michael Cera is, he's a gimpy kid who acts in (usually) terrible movies which purport to be comedies but in fact usually are simply pitiable failures.

But even the most wretched "actor" can find a particular movie that redeems their career.

Now, understand that I am not able to foretell the future, and further that as I have not seen this movie - only the trailer - I am unable to guess if this will accomplish that near-miracle for Mr. Cera.

But.

Ok, let's back up a bit.

There's a series of graphic novels - fancy comic books - called Scott Pilgrim.

The eponymous character is a slacker and mediocre musician who manages to fall in love with the wrong girl - the REALLY wrong girl, whose "League of Evil Ex-Boyfriends," each of whom has some variety of supernatural powers - all decide to battle Scott to the death.

There is very little seriousness to be had here, but a hell of a lot of amusement; jokes are made at the expense of video games, comic books, slackers, and the inevitable escapist fantasy life led by those in - shall we say - lower income brackets.

So, yeah, the books are fun.

So when I saw that they were making a movie, and that Michael Cera would be in it, I groaned deeply and banged my forehead firmly against my desk.

Imagine my surprise when the trailer they posted for it managed to capture and convey the graphic novels nearly perfectly.

Imagine my further surprise to discover that it's directed by the guy who made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

So, here it is: Scott Pilgrim Versus The World. If snarky graphic novels aren't your thing, you probably won't like this.

But I thought it was badass, and will melt your face off with awesome.

Apples And '57 Chevrolets

2010-05-31T13:30:00.000-04:00

You know, I'm getting sick of hearing people who clearly cannot play "one of these things is not like the others" compare conservatives demanding that Obama get involved with the oil spill cleanup, with conservatives getting angry when Obama tries to nationalize the car manufacturing industry. (Pictured: angry retards.)

So, ok.

Let me be real, real clear here.

Them two thangs thar ain't the same.

There is a difference between "a threat to all life in the Gulf of Mexico and all the businesses that depend on it," and "oops, our car company might go broke."

It is none of the government's business whether or not a private business goes broke; saving a particular corporation from bankruptcy is not properly a function of the federal government.

The proper function of the federal government is to protect its citizens from catastrophes and dangers to the extent that it can do so without infringing upon their rights. (You're right to say "you should get out of the way of the hurricane!" but have no right to say "you MUST get out of the way of the hurricane.")

Catastrophes and dangers. (Pictured: catastrophe.)

Right!

Like that thing where all life in the Gulf of Mexico and all businesses that depend on it are at risk?

Would that be a catastrophe? A danger? Maybe a catastrophic danger?

See, if history was as the mainstream media portrays it, they would be absolutely right to castigate President Bush for the response to Katrina.

Katrina was unquestionably a disaster, and the response was unquestionably insufficient and slow.

Of course, they leave out pertinent facts, such as the fact that the troops who famously refused to let people leave the city of New Orleans were National Guard troops - and thus under the control of then-Louisiana governor, Kathleen Blanco. (Pictured: Governor Blanco.)

They also leave out that Governor Blanco removed one of President Bush's most powerful tools for controlling the situation, and refused - in writing - to allow the Louisiana Guard to be temporarily federalized so they could centralize command.

They also leave out the fact that Governor Blanco assured President Bush that the levees were fine and New Orleans was in no danger - after the levees had already broken. (Bonus: video.) And that Governor Blanco refused to allow Mayor Nagin of New Orleans to issue an evacuation order.

They also leave out the myriad failures of then-New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin, who did practically everything in his power to stymie relief efforts, including barring American Red Cross workers and relief vehicles from entering the city of New Orleans, thus forcing them to set up in the outskirts of town, far from the worst-damaged areas, and refusing to send the 1000 buses he had available for evacuation until they were already underwater. (Pictured: Ray Nagin's bus fleet.)

Despite those things, President Bush was completely responsible for a hurricane. It was a disaster; a catastrophe; and despite the fact that virtually every error made in the recovery effort was made elsewhere, Bush accepted the blame for the problems without a whimper.

Contrast this with Obama, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

To counter the endless "blame Bush" and "whose idea was 'drill, baby, drill'?" idiots, let me remind you first that the oil lies offshore; if you want to have it, you have to go where it is.

Obama has been in office at this point for 16 months; during that time, BP/Amoco has gotten break after break from this administration. (Pictured: break time.)

See, many of you might not know this, but BP has the worst safety record in the industry.

Seriously.

So much so that they have the highest number of deaths per refinery in the entire industry; so much so that ONLY TWO of their refineries account for 97% of ALL recorded "serious" safety violations every year; they have had refineries flat-out blow sky-high, as witness the 2005 destruction of the Texas City refinery, previously the worst workplace accident in U.S. history, after which it was discovered that BP had decided to build the cheapest possible accommodations for their workers, rather than the blast hardened ones that might have saved 15 workers' lives - because it was cheaper to pay their families off if they died than to build the safety features; and President Bush hammered them for it, fining them over $180 million dollars before his term in office was over.

Then we cut to the Obama Administration.

Despite their blathering about being "on top of things," and "in charge," we find out that they not only have no real idea what's going on, but have in fact simply been taking BP's word for the whole thing, all along, even to the extent of accepting BP's numbers for the magnitude of the spill, despite the fact that any child with a pocket calculator could look at the video feed from the spill and determine that their figures are a ~~giant cartload of horseshit~~ distraction while they make up more excuses. (Pictured: NOT 2.5 gallons per minute.)

But it's better than that.

See, under the Obama Administration - which knew BP's safety record and presumably had some idea how serious things would have to be for President Bush, openly in bed with the oil companies, to give them a $100 million dollar fine for a single incident - the safety violations got way, way worse.

So much worse that even the empty-eyed slackers at Halliburton and Transocean Ltd. tried to tell BP that the demands, and shortcuts, they were making on the Deepwater Horizon rig were unsafe, and got told to sit down and shut up by one of BP's faceless corporate drones. (Pictured: Halliburton workers.)

So much worse that the inspection sheets - required by federal law - that document the safety procedures used - and compliance with them - on oil rigs were being filled out BY BP EMPLOYEES and handed to the safety inspectors, who signed off on them.

So much worse that once the extent of the missing safety documentation on the Deepwater Horizon rig was known, the Minerals Management Service director was fired, and the service itself was sued.

Let's see.

Under President Bush, when BP's safety violations resulted in a catastrophe, they got fined and watch-dogged.

Under Obama, they get hail-fellow-well-met and once they create a disaster, they get the full faith and trust of the United States government. (Pictured: Glad-handing.)

THOSE are apples and oranges, folks.

Katrina and this?

An Act of God, followed up by direct opposition on the part of the state and local authorities, versus "I don't want to screw with a company that gave me boatloads of money" ?

Apples and '57 Chevrolets.

They're not only not directly comparable, they're not even in the same food chain.

Obama wants to do a public mea culpa, as though that will mitigate the catastrophe his choices have sown, but notice that this only affects the politics of the issue; he is STILL NOT GETTING ANYTHING DONE.

Louisiana is now building berms to keep the oil out of the wetlands despite not having federal permission to do so, because it has become apparent that there's never GOING to be any federal permission to do so. While the Governor of Louisiana personally goes out in a boat and helps build the berms, Obama... Plays golf. (Thought i was kidding, with that picture earlier, didn't you? It's ok, you can admit it.)

Obama is playing politics.

What he needs to be doing is taking ACTUAL - not figurative - control of the situation, and getting the American oil companies involved in trying to seal the leak.

That, or...

Let Governor Jindal do it. Especially given that he seems to be the only person in government right now who actually thinks this is a big deal. (Pictured: Big deal.)

Possible Massive Disaster And Coverup In Gulf, READ THIS!!!

2010-05-24T15:34:00.000-04:00

As the news has been telling us, the Gulf oil spill has not been fixed, and they aren't making significant progress; everybody's yelling at BP, and ignoring the fact that the Obama Administration's response thus far has been to make a fact-finding commission.

But if you notice, the news has been surprisingly reticent with actual details about the events on Deepwater Horizon, the causes of the rig going down, and the exact extent of the mess.

They can't even tell you the quantity of oil that's being pumped directly into the ocean.

What they don't tell you is that BP has had a submersible-mounted camera down at the actual leak to monitor the efforts at repairing it.

The link to the cam is here.

This is interesting indeed in context of what I am about to link you to.

See, yesterday, problems started out there, over and above the existing ones.

Sunday night, about 6 PM Central Time, another eruption of oil was visible on the Spillcam.

It didn't take long for the sea floor to goddamn collapse under the thing and release an eruption of oil so massive that the cameras were unable to even send images.

But what makes that really interesting indeed is that BP almost immediately cut off the camera feed - and replaced it with what looks like looped imagery from prior to yesterday's events, because no evidence of the damage clearly visible in the pictures (at the link here) is now visible on the Spillcam.

Based on that visible damage, and the images of the eruption, the magnitude of the disaster may now be beyond human capacity to repair.

The quantities of oil now being released into the ocean are literally incalculable.

So, good job, Obama Administration! Rather than require BP to pay for the cleanup and just getting on with repairing the goddamn thing, your inaction has now created possibly the greatest catastrophe in human history...

And your response, and that of the media, thus far, is to pretend it isn't happening.