Life Imitates Art

So, KFC now has a sandwich held together with two pieces of chicken, rather than bread:




Sorry, Colonel, but the Tracy Jordan got there first:

In Defense of (some) Television

FCC chairman Newton N. Minnow famously remarked in a 1961 speech that the television was a "vast wasteland," a remark that has only gotten more true in the nearly 50 years since then. However, people often forget a line which prefaced that remark: "when television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better." For good or for ill, television is one of the important ways that our society manifests its culture, so it would be a mistake to dismiss it all as lowbrow garbage. It has been remarked that if Beethoven or Mozart were alive today, they would probably be composing scores for movies, since that is where the top-flight jobs in orchestral composition are; similarly, if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be just as likely to write for television as for cinema.

So, where are the oases in the vast wasteland?

CURRENTLY RUNNING

• South Park - Finally getting its edge back after a couple of inconsistent seasons, and still one of the best sources for social and political satire available today. Usually thought provoking and occasionally brilliant, it has a lot in common with Greek Old Comedy. They're all available online, and legally, at South Park Studios.
  
• 30 Rock - Whenever South Park fails, 30 Rock picks up the slack. Jabs at deranged corporate culture, vapid entertainment, and career obsession abound. If you're a Netflix subscriber, all of the seasons released on DVD can be watched online.
  
• Castle - Unlike many other police procedural shows on the air today, there is very little reliance on magical forensic science. Basic forensics are there, but what's more important is old-fashioned reasoning and pounding the pavement, much like Sherlock Holmes. And, for once, we have a TV show in which we see a good father raising a happy and well-adjusted teenage daughter.
  
• Jeopardy! - This has been highly regarded and on the air for decades for one very simple reason: its a game show that spends less time on gimmicks and drama, and more time testing real knowledge.
  

NO LONGER RUNNING:

• Jericho - This show really thought long and hard about how modern people would adapt to life without electricity, and about what the fall of the United States would be like. Both seasons highly recommended.
• Firefly - Smart, fun, and politically thoughtful. Be sure to see the followup movie, Serenity. All episodes available cyclically on Hulu.
  
• Red Dwarf - A long-running and side-splittingly funny sci-fi parody from the BBC. Leaving no sci-fi trope unskewered, it really is oddly thought provoking. I normally hate laugh tracks in shows, but here it's appropriate: the over-arching plot is the life of the last human alive in a mostly empty universe, so the simulated laughter of an audience helps to balance out the loneliness. All eight series recommended, but the Back to Earth special was a bit of a disappointment. Also available on Netflix streaming.
  

STATUS UNCERTAIN:

• Torchwood - The first six episodes were terrible, like a 12-year-old with a really filthy mouth stole a few ideas from The X-Files and wrote some Doctor Who fanfiction. Once it found its feet, however, it became quite good. The strength of British science fiction has always been its willingness to ask weird existential questions, and that's what Torchwood is all about. It's off the air at the moment, though rumors are circulating of a forth series, and possibly an American version. Also available on Netflix streaming.

Ride on in majesty! In lowly pomp, ride on to die.

Today is Palm Sunday.

Until last year, I had always though of "All Glory, Laud, and Honor" and "Hosanna, Loud Hosanna" as the definitive Palm Sunday hymns (better recordings of the tunes here and here, respectively). I still like them quite a lot, and it is especially a privilege to be able to sing "All Glory, Laud, and Honor," since we rarely get to sing hymns so old and so closely translated from their original language.

However, last year I was introduced to "Ride on! Ride on in Majesty." It now reigns supreme in my mind:



(The tune, called "Winchester New," can be heard by itself here.)

Everything about it just comes together perfectly: a rousing and memorable tune, beautiful poetry, and so much theology crammed into every verse that it even gives Charles Wesley a run for his money! The triumphant and glorious themes are tempered by a trembling anticipation of the pain and suffering that must soon come. Then, at the very end, we get a tiny glimpse of the joy of Easter. This is a perfect microcosm of Palm Sunday.

Earth-friendly, locally-grown ... lightbulbs?

Audi has been on my Ideological Bad List since Super Bowl XLIV, thanks to their Green Police commercial. If you haven't seen it, or are disinclined to watch it, it shows various people getting busted by a special police force for not performing fashionable environmental gestures. For example, a homeowner is ordered by a team in a helicopter to compost a fruit rind rather than throw it away, but we never see them ordering anyone to compost their own feces, which would be quite unfashionable but would probably accomplish far more. The crux of the commercial is that, at a Green Police traffic checkpoint, a man driving a 2010 Audi A3 TDI Clean Diesel (30 mpg city/42 mpg highway) is allowed to pass, while all of the other drivers are harassed, fined, or worse. Thus, the bad list: if Audi honestly cared that much about the environment, they'd stop building over-engineered luxury cars that feed conspicuous consumption, and resurrect the Geo Metro XFi (53 mpg city/58 mpg highway, or more). Of course it would never sell, since which of these do you think is more appealing to the yuppie-hipster trying to save the planet while still keeping up with appearances?





This is especially not funny because in some parts of the world, and for one unfashionable "offense," the Green Police really will be coming after you in the near future. The U.S., the E.U. and Canada have all passed legislation aimed a forcing their subjects, either de facto or de jure, to adopt compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). Yes, they do require less power than incandescent bulbs, which translates into less carbon pumped into the atmosphere by the end-user's power plant, assuming that the power source behind them is something that produces carbon dioxide and not solar, wind, hydroelectric, or the dreaded fast-breeder nuclear reactor.

The well-documented problem with CFLs, however, is that like all fluorescent lights, they contain mercury, which can be quite hazardous if allowed to leech into groundwater from people breaking bulbs or not disposing of them correctly. In response to this, the EPA has quite correctly pointed out that the amount of mercury released from a coal-fired power plant powering a CFL for a given length of time, added to that CFL's own mercury content, is about a 1/3 the mercury output of a coal-fired power plant powering an incandescent bulb for that same length of time. This logic holds up for the half of the U.S. which gets its electricity from coal, but for the other half, not so much (source: U.S. Department of Energy):



The other trouble with CFLs, of which I have seen very little coverage, is that all of them are made in China. This poses three problems.

First, China has significantly lower standards for worker safety than the U.S. and Europe.

Second, China also has much looser standards for environmental protection, which makes one wonder if the products of a CFL plant in China would really be better for the Earth than the products of an incandescent plant in Virginia. However, it is indisputable that manufacturing in China makes it cheaper for GE to meet the efficiency standards it basically wrote for the U.S. government, i.e., the de facto mandate for CFLs that I mentioned above.

Third, is it really better for the environment to buy one item (with a much more complex control mechanism) built in China and then shipped overseas, in plastic packaging, by a diesel-powered cargo ship, than to buy 8 simpler items built a few hours' drive away and trucked that relatively short distance in recycled cardboard packaging? End-to-end resource analyses such as this are notoriously difficult, but when you consider the other problems with CFLs, my instinct tells me "no." This is quite similar to a point that Michael Pollan makes in either In Defense of Food or The Omnivore's Dilemma (I can't remember which, since they kind of run together). He argues that if you're trying to make your food choices less environmentally harmful, you should consider the possibility that locally grown food that lacks the USDA's organic stamp may be better than officially "organic" food grown far away, due to the higher overhead of shipping and packaging that big organic entails.

I remain a true CFL skeptic; I don't buy it, but I could be convinced otherwise given a good argument. However, I'm never buying a factory-new Audi.

Addendum: Other alumni of Tony's Ideological Bad List include:

• Border's Books and Music, for deciding not to sell the issue of Free Inquiry that ran the Jyllards-Postden Muhammad cartoons
• my senator, George Voinovich, for voting against the bill that would have recognized full faith and credit for concealed carry permits

Quis Googliet ipsos Googles?

Good to keep in mind, but it's important to also remember serveral things.

First and foremost, concentrations of power like this always happen for a very simple reason: only perhaps 1 in 10,000 people have the ambition, talent, and luck necessary to create a massively successful company in a given field (yes, I'm paraphrasing Pentti Linkola here). With so few at the top, it will always happen that a few will control almost everything; nature abhors a vacuum. You can cry "antitrust" all you want, but all that does is transfer power to the state (not desirable, since the state is the only "company" that can force you to buy its products) or delay the inevitable. The clearest example of this is the oil companies of the world: of the top 20, more than half are state-owned, and #2 is ExxonMobil, which is basically Standard Oil reconstituted 90 years after being broken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Second, if you're concerned about the need for net neutrality ("it also wants to own the cables that deliver the Internet itself"), the truth is that restricted service doesn't sell. This is why CompuServe and Prodigy went the way of the dodo. I'm not terribly worried about Google squashing speech online at the moment, since this video has been up for 16 days with a quarter million hits on YouTube, which is owned by Google, and if you Google the phrase "Google is...," phrases in the top ten suggested searches include "SkyNet," "scared of Islam," "making us stupid," and "the devil." Similarly, if you're worried about privacy, you can always take the appropriate security measures. The beauty of ubiquitous free email accounts and ubiquitous free Wi-Fi, combined with encryption, is that we're effectively back to the days of being able to make anonymous calls from back-alley payphones, plus we can now publish dissident literature this way. For the truly paranoid, you'd have to buy a "clean" laptop to do this, but basic laptops with Wi-Fi capability are relatively cheap nowadays, especially on the secondhand market; my own 6-year-old laptop is more than capable (excepting the nigh-useless battery), and the same model costs secondhand about 1/7th of what mine did.

Third, while it might be a bit frightening to contemplate one company in charge of your online life like this, your online life need not be identical to the whole of your life. Google can't "follow your friendships," it can only follow what you and your friends do online, with Google products. Useful as Facebook, Google chat, and their ilk are, they are not friendships in and of themselves. Plus, you are astronomically more likely to get spotted, and identified, coming out of a sex shop by someone face-to-face than by someone using Google Earth.

The final point of the video, that Google makes the vast portion of its income from advertising, does raise an interesting question that we need to ask ourselves as individuals and as a society: why is advertising so powerful? Like Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, "advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need." This is not a problem that any government can solve, it has to be a conscious choice on an individual's part to be less neurotic and oversocialized. I applaud you if you're working past this.

For the moment, I'm still willing to trust Google. But that's a conscious decision, and I'm fully aware of the need to keep my powder dry.

(explanation of post title)

Is there a mandatory minimum for manufacturing drug abuse, with the intent to distribute?

I'm not normally one to go down the rabbit hole of reducing things I don't like to social constructs. It often misses the point. For example, people who argue that gender is a social construct are willfully blind to the fact that there really are massive, inborn differences between the sexes, many of which have been specially selected by evolution as beneficial survival tools.

Sometimes, however, it is true. I have seen it argued that the modern teenager is a social construct; it seems plainly obvious to me that our modern concept of the teenager could not exist without mandatory schooling, the automobile, and a youth-obsessed popular culture which says that teens are better off creating their own society than becoming junior members of adult society.

Another legitimate example of a social construct is the definition of drug abuse that Dr. Nancy Caroline gives in her magnum opus, Emergency Care in the Streets, which is one of several textbooks for the Paramedic class that I will be starting shortly. The definition is given as "any use of drugs that causes physical, psychological, economic, legal, or social harm to the user or others affected by the user's behavior" (6th ed., p. G.12). My problem is not with the "social" clause, as you might have thought from the introduction, but with the "legal" clause.

The way that definition is structured, we can call any person who runs afoul of the law by use of drugs an abuser, regardless of the circumstances. The 20-year-old National Merit Scholar and ROTC cadet who safely enjoys a rousing game of beer pong with his fraternity brothers, the chemotherapy patient who needs to smoke marijuana to have some semblance of an appetite, and the grandmother who bought a little too much cold medicine are all made drug abusers out of thin air if they're busted. Justitia is supposed to be blind, not deaf and stupid.

When we use the law to construct character flaws for upstanding citizens like this, the law starts to mirror Penn Jillette's portrait of pointless Victorian-type manners: "random rules to sniff by ... don't really have any purpose at all, other than to control you and make [manners consultants] richer." Substitute "random rules to sniff by" with "random rules on what you can't sniff (or drink, smoke, etc.)," and "make manners consultants richer" with "keep politicians and bureaucrats employed," consider how miserably we've failed at winning the "War on Drugs," and you begin to see what I mean.

This leads to several different problems on top of making life unnecessarily difficult for the accused. First, it burdens the legal system at the expense of taxpayers. Second, it breeds habituation to not thinking critically among people when they buy into the propaganda that necessarily comes with laws that make no sense; we don't need "just say no" campaigns for murder, arson, rape, theft, or (generally) fraud because is plainly obvious why these are undesirable, and the vast majority of people understand that. Third, it creates a general distrust for rule of law, cracking one of the foundation-stones of Western civilization.

So, I propose a mandatory minimum for lawmakers who create these asinine laws: the loudest and most virulent disrespect we can muster. And we can always look to our masters for comic relief.

Another loss in the War on (imaginary) Drugs. YAY!

(originally posted 25 June 2009)

Supreme Court Says Child’s Rights Violated by Strip Search

Good news for the most part. I suppose hoping that the principal, nurse, and administrative assistant would be clamped in a pillory in the center of town and pelted with rotten eggs under a sign reading "we violated a 13-year-old girl" would have been too much to ask.

Congratulations, Sandra Bullock!

Sandra Bullock has won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in The Blind Side. This is one of my favorite films, and her performance is largely responsible for that. If there ever was a rendering of Nietzsche's idealized nobleman, it is her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy.

(SPOILER ALERT!)

When she decided to help Michael, she did not try to feel his pain, help him in some passive way, look down on him, or try to appeal to a mythical status as a "special" person. Each of these is some combination of counterproductive, impossible, or condescending. She acted out of pure, overflowing generosity and took an active role in raising him up. When she knew she was right, she never asked for permission to do anything, much to the chagrin of weaker-willed and less wise people. When Michael was threatened by a common thug, her response was not to run and hide, since that would have left the problem unresolved; nor did she try to appeal the thug's "better nature," since a thug has none. She threatened violence, preferably at her own hand, in return. It worked.

Not surprisingly, this movie has generated a little dogpile of controversy. Perhaps most oddly, one reviewer, who at press time had not even seen it, pondered how it was that a "sports movie" could be Oscar material. If he had bothered to see it before writing that, he would have known that The Blind Side is not a sports movie. My first thought-out impression of it, which left my lips about three minutes after walking out of the theater, was that it is a movie which happens to be about about a poor black youth being adopted by a rich white family and who goes on to be drafted by the NFL, but is not a movie about class, race, or sports.

Predictably, however, the race issue simply will not die. That particular reviewer might have had a point about the movie's emphasis on the "pathologies the black gentle giant has escaped: the crack-addicted mother, the thugs of the country-ghetto housing project," but for the fact that, in not-terribly-fictionalized terms, it really happened. Michael Oher's biological mother was (is?) addicted to crack cocaine, and his biological father was murdered. For that same reason, it really happened, Ms. Anderson's bilious critique of the movie's portrayal of "the white folks who took him in" has no real ground to stand on. It is pure resentment. The truth hurts: we're not all white devils. Perhaps Dr. King would ask Ms. Anderson to judge the Tuohys, both real and fictionalized, "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their [generous, patient, and uplifting] character."

Finally, Ms. Anderson calls it cynicism that Michael's adoptive father would remark that "Michael's gift is his ability to forget." This is not cynicism; it is is a cold, hard fact of life that we must forget a little bit in order to move on from the pain we have suffered. This is why Michael is far from the "superfluous" victim of white propaganda that she makes him out to be. Were it not for this remarkable trait of forgetting and not being bitter (just like the real Michael Oher), Michael could never have been free. This is because he not only had to be free from a terrible past, but free for a brighter future. The former is primarily external, but the latter must come from within. As he so frequently did, Nietzsche said it best: "Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! But your fiery eyes should tell me: free for what?" If you don't know this about Michael by the end of the film, you weren't paying attention.

Once again, congratulations Ms. Bullock, and thank you.

Using GPG

I have a link to Gnu Privacy Guard on the right side of each page of this blog. This is because it is one of the best tools for protecting your privacy available today. It's also open-source, which I support immensely. Though I've given up on software development as a hobby, I can still appreciate software written by hobbyists. If nothing else, software developed by hobbyists avoids the baggage train of suffocating corporate culture and redundant advertising.

Open-source software does have weaknesses of its own, usually relating to ease-of-use. Unlike most open-source software, however, GPG can be easily installed with simple, click-through installer. This installer can be had by clicking on that link at the right, and then following the link to "GPG4Win." Also unlike most open-source software, it comes with easy-to-understand, straightforward instructions for the average user.

Unfortunately, that documentation is out-of-date. Four years out-of-date, to be exact, and the software has undergone some significant changes in that time. You'll be OK through the installation process and the setup of public (yours and other people's) and private keys, despite the fact that most of the screenshots are in German. However, when you want to actually encrypt or decrypt anything, you'll hit a brick wall. The directions will tell you to use a program called WinPT and in so many words, it ain't there anymore.

Here's what you do: Say you want to send an email with encrypted text in the body of the email. Write that text as a textfile in Notepad, and save it somewhere you can find it. Right click on the file and choose "Sign and Encrypt." This will launch the background program Kleopatra if it's not already running, and open a dialog box with, for some reason, only "Encrypt" selected, rather than "Sign and Encrypt." Either choice will get the job done, but signing can be useful sometimes. Also, since you'll be pasting the text into an email, check the box for "Text Output (ASCII Armor)," and click "Next." Select the public key of the intended recipient, click "Add," then "Encrypt." This will create a file in the same folder as your plaintext file, with the same name, but with a new filename extension, ."asc." Open this in Notepad, copy all of the text you see (including the "begin" and "end" lines), paste it into your email, and send it off.

If, however, you want to send the encrypted file as an attachment, perhaps it's an image or a formatted text document, or you want a secure backup of the same on your own computer, do all of the above, but don't check "Text Output (ASCII Armor)."

To decrypt ASCII armor text that comes to you in an email, paste it into a blank textfile, right click on it, select "More GpgEX Options -> Decrypt," and enter the passphrase you chose for that key when you are prompted to do so. Do more or less the same thing you did to encrypt. For fully encrypted files, skip the Notepad step.

The XXI Winter Olympic Games

I like curling. It's a winter sport that lets you keep your feet under you, and "even at the highest levels of play, players are expected to 'call their own fouls,' so to speak, such as alerting the opposing skip if they 'burned' a stone. It is also traditional for the winning team to buy the losing team a drink after the game" (from Wikipedia) Such a pleasant switch from the silver medalist trying to mark his territory on the gold podium.

Akiko Suzuki must be psychic. A few days before her short program, I commented that, since the theme for one of the rounds of ice dancing was folk dances, someone needed to Riverdance on the ice; a Maypole dance might have been cool, but Olympic skating doesn't allow props. Then, lo and behold, Ms. Suzuki did her short program to "Andalucia," from Riverdance! True, the tune was a Flamenco not an Irish step dance tune, but it was close enough for me to be amused.

Every time I see this McDonald's commercial, I crack up. After one of the many times that it ran, NBC's coverage of the games cut to a talking head interviewing some of the athletes about how they had been preparing for the games. One of them said that she had only eaten organic food for the last two years. Guess you can't eat like that Olympian at McDonald's.

Finally, rest in piece, Nodar Kumaritashvili.

Attention Safari users

Blogger apparently doesn't like you. You have my sympathies, but try using Firefox for the time being.

My Thoughts on Terminator: Salvation

SPOILER ALERT: Contains spoilers for The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, and Terminator: Salvation.

The Terminator universe has long been one of my favorite sci-fi franchises, a good antidote to Star Trek's frequent lapses into the land of liberal wet-dreamism. On a personal level, T2 was the movie that made me realize that I had grown past kid's movies. In the scene where Sarah, John, and the T800 are fleeing the mental institution, a tear rolls down John's cheek when Sarah is angry at him for risking his life to save her. The T800 sees this, and asks John, “what's wrong with your eyes?” I had been looking away from the TV screen at that moment, probably getting another slice of pizza, and thought to myself, “he's probably squinting and needs glasses; he will resent this, and the T800 will later ask him why he resents a component of one of his systems, and he will get over it.” I had reliably predicted pandering life-lesson garbage like this in children's movies for several years, and was growing quite sick of it. When the credits rolled and that line was never uttered, I realized that I had crossed a threshold into something much better.

Naturally, I was very excited when I heard about T4, since I was enjoying the Sarah Conner Chronicles immensely but T3 had been a bit of a letdown (but with its good points, nonetheless). Having seen T4 through twice now, my mixed feelings remain and I feel compelled to share some of my thoughts. Some reviewers have already made some of these points, but I have tried to offer my own perspective on all of them.

What went right:

Best damn movie trailer I've ever seen. Go watch it if you haven't already.

Props, sets, costuming, and atmosphere. The “look and feel” of this film is absolutely spectacular. Principle cast members were required to read The Road, and the beneficial influence is easy to see. The double-helix-and-broadsword insignia of the Resistance is a great motif, though I can't help but wonder if someone on the production staff stole the idea from the Knights Templar of Deus Ex: Invisible War (images); both organizations exist to fight “the machine,” and the resemblance between their insignia is uncanny. Bottom left, the John Connor action figure showing the insignia prominently; upper left, a close picture of the design; right, screenshot from Invisible War from a clandestine Templar lair; click for larger version:

A-10 Warthogs as the Resistance's primary air resource. A-10s can perform a variety of roles but excel at infantry support, which is probably what would be most needed in the war on SkyNet, at least on a day-to-day basis. Plus, A-10s are legendary for for their ruggedness and multiple-redundancy, a good asset in less-than-ideal maintenance conditions.

John Conner famous as a voice of hope on the radio. T3 ends with the beginning of this, and it's great as a continuity point and as a thematic element. He appears to preface all of his addresses with, “if you're listening to this, you are the Resistance,” in contrast to the stodgy, bureaucratic, self-aggrandizing leadership of the Resistance. Anybody who knows me well understands why this resonates with me.

Primitive SkyNet, primitive weapons: People have complained about the use of conventional smallarms, and robots that are vulnerable to them. These people forget that T4 takes place about 10 years before every other glimpse of the war that we've seen so far; M16s against breakable T600s is a feature, not a bug, of this story. (If you pay attention, however, you can see the beginnings of the energy weapons common in the 2029 era: the harvester bot has one mounted as a cannon on its shoulder.) It was also quite refreshing to see their performance on other things portrayed realistically as well: what do you get when you shoot a gas tank with a shotgun? A leaky gas tank. Also, it is made quite clear that SkyNet is still a serious threat even with its San Francisco base destroyed; this is consistent with the idea of a distributed SkyNet with no system core that we were introduced to in T3. One odd point of contrast, though: in T1, Reese says that the humans lay low during the day and fight at night, and we see this happening in the flashforewards; in T4, he says the opposite and the humans do the opposite. Whether this reflects a different level of imaging technology available to SkyNet in 2018 vice 2029, an eventual change in tactics by the humans, or a simple continuity gaff, I'm not sure.

Roland Kickinger: This is the Austrian bodybuilder who played the T800 prototype in lieu of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Fanboys who say there is but one true T800, and he is Arnie, need to get over it. The idea of roles getting locked into only one actor is very new; imagine the loss to our culture if the role of Hamlet had gotten locked into one actor (this example is not my own, but I don't remember where it came from). It will also be interesting to see how the digital insertion of Arnie's face will stand up to the test of time.

What went wrong:

Have a heart. My suspension of disbelief is funny like this. I can accept robots that look human. I can accept time travel. I can accept sentient computers. I cannot accept a successful heart transplant being performed with second-world-at-best-level medical technology, in a field hospital, by a veterinary assistant (no diss on veterinary assistants intended, I'm just sayin'.) Each of the Terminator installments have a critical twist of some sort like this near the end: John Conner's conception Ouroborus in T1, the T800's self-sacrifice in T2, hiding out to live in T3, and forward in time to the war in SCC. T3's awesome twist turned a D+ movie into a B- movie, and by corollary, T4's stinker turned a B- movie into a C- movie.

Have a personality. If Christian Bale had played John Conner's face-to-face dialog with half the charisma that he displayed on the radio, the character would have been much more believable. Also, his speech about “we've been fighting a long time” to Wright, while quite good on its own merits, looses some of its gravitas when you consider that Wright has no clue what the hell Conner is talking about.

No. NO. NO!!! HOLY CRAP ON TUESDAY'S TOAST, NO!!!!! You're not going to shock someone out of asystole with a pair of wires you yanked out of the wall, or with a defibrillator for that matter. This is almost as annoying as the Glocks that make cocking sounds as you draw them in SCC. The CSI effect applies to disciplines other than forensic science, too.

Action scenes flat for lack of music. The lack of accompanying music was what made several of the chase scenes in T3 play flat, and T4 has the same problem in several places.

Not enough running and hiding, too much pounding and throwing. Most of the fight scenes between humans and terminators in previous installments involved a lot of running and hiding on the parts of the humans, because the terminators could turn them into hamburger quite easily. When Michael Biehn was asked in an interview about what it was like working with Arnold Schwarzenegger in T1, he had to respond that he really didn't know, since he was never in frame with Arnie; by the time Reese is in frame with the T800 (then fleshless and portrayed by a puppet), he doesn't have long to live. They should have remembered this when writing the last fight scene of T4. Unless, of course, they were trying to imply that a cat had a hand (paw?) in writing SkyNet, which means that terminators play with their prey before killing it.

What could have made it better:

Bloodthirsty. Instead of a heart transplant, have Conner need a massive blood transfusion, be type AB-, and have Wright be the only available source of AB-. This kills Wright, a redemptive fate that he willingly accepts. Not only would this be more realistic, but also consistent with the identification of blood with humanity (near the beginning, Reese says of the Resistance armband, “it stands for blood.”).

Help a brother out. I realize that T4 and SCC would probably have to take place in different timelines, and maybe T4 couldn't mention or show Derek Reese for legal reasons, but a throwaway line from Kyle Reese referencing “my brother” would have been a nice.

War is hell. So is life after death for Wright. Put yourself in Wright's shoes. You're executed, then wake up in the war against SkyNet (naked and taking clothes from a dead body, a subtle reference to naked time traveling from previous installments). Wouldn't you think to yourself, “is this hell?” The idea of heaven and hell having a geography similar to earth is not unheard of. Milton used it in Paradise Lost, and Hellblazer/Constantine expanded on it. Some development of this idea in T4 would have been interesting.

How, precisely, do you insert candles into a birthday lettuce?

(originally posted 26 July 2009)

No more sweets for school celebrations, district says.

People, kids included, don't get fat because they eat tasty, fatty food as part of the occasional celebration; they get fat because they don't exercise (which, to give credit where credit is due, is mentioned in the article) and eat lousy food every day.

This is the kind of health puritanism that makes life miserable,... especially when the government gets in on it.

Eminant Domain, and the Law of Unintended Consquences

(originally posted 16 November 2009)

A Turning Point for Eminent Domain

This is (almost) exactly what happened in Cincinnati. The city took the land from Inn the Wood and Acropolis Chilli, by declairing their area "blighted" and invoking emminent domain, and sold it to another private firm for "economic redevelopment," which then went bankrupt. Now, rather having the blight of two thriving,... well-regarded businesses, we have the economic redevelopment of grass and rubble. The state is not your friend.

Stalking the Wild Chicken McNugget through the Primeval Forest

(originally posted 30 December 2009)

Avatar Partners with McDonald's

The amount of cognitive dissonance here is absolutely amazing to anyone who thinks about it for a few seconds. I'll leave it at that, since I have faith that anyone reading this who had seen Avatar and eaten at McDonald's is smart enough to figure out where I'm going with this.

On a related note, I would have dismissed the plot of Avatar as yet another tiresome example of the pure-hearted natives vs. big, bad white man story, but for one line. I'm paraphrasing here, but the Nav'i high priestess hit the nail on the head when she remarked that "nature does not choose sides, it only maintains the balance of existence." In other words, nature is fundamentally non-moral. Thus, if we want to have a worldview that is consistent with reality, i.e., not insane, we should root for our own side; if we have no dog in the race, we should root for the winner, whomsoever that may be.

This comes with two caviats, however. First, I'm not calling the humans who sided with the Nav'i insane if they did so because they believed that the Nav'i had the better-adjusted worldview. Most people watching the movie, however, would probably root for the Nav'i out of feelings of pity or belief in inalienable righs.

Second, none of my reasoning so far has supposed the existence of the Abrahamic God. Admit God, and you can start making some arguments about the intrinsic worth of invididuals and, therefore, rights. As I've said before, if I weren't a Christian, I'd be a Nietzschian/philosophical pagan.

Christmas Wars, Episode MMMMCXCVII: Starbucks Makes Tony Go "WTF?"

(Originally posted 10 December 2009)

I only get into this fight if things get really absurd and/or funny. This is one of those times.

While I was visiting my girlfriend in Michigan last week, I spent a whole lot of time in the Barnes and Noble across the street from Michigan State University. Primary, I needed the free WiFi to work on papers while she was doing ballet stuff, but, like most Barnes and Nobles, this one has a Starbucks in it, so I could get my caffeine fix.

While I was standing in line, I noticed two bags of coffee displayed on top of the pastry rack. One was labeled "Christmas Blend," the other, "Holiday Blend." I can't find any pictures of the bags online, and the Starbucks on UC's campus appeared to only have "Christmas," but the descriptions that I was able to read while standing in line were identical. It looked like Starbucks had prepared a seasonal blend and packaged it two different ways, one politically correct and the other pandering to Christians, i.e., one PC the other, uhhh..... crap, now I'm doing it, too!

So, I asked the barista if they were the same. She said that the Christmas Blend was spicy, compared to the Holiday Blend's sweet bouquet. My skepticism unplacated, I decided to do some research.

Christmas:

"...sweet and spicy, with a flavor derived from bright, sparkling Latin American coffees and smooth, full-bodied Asia/Pacific beans. But it’s the Aged Sumatran beans, carefully held for 3 to 5 years before roasting, that give it that delicious signature spicy taste."

Holiday:

"From Latin America come bright, sparkling beans. Asia/Pacific beans provide their own smooth, full-bodied taste. And Aged Sumatran coffees – carefully held for 3 to 5 years – complete the blend with its signature spicy flavor."

Naughty, naughty Starbucks!

My prediction: Starbucks will ask Santa to leave it a shiny new marketing director under the tree this year, but despite efforts to placate St. Nick by leaving out a Cinnamon Chip Scone and a Venti Peppermint Mocha, Starbucks will wake up on Holiday Day to find copious amounts of coal. Maybe weird Aunt Bertha, who smells like formaldehyde and makes fruitcakes suitable only as wheel chocks, will give Starbucks a hairshirt in a hideous reindeer motif.

Hello, world!

My background in software development occasionally comes back to haunt me. Hence, the name of this, my first post.

Since graduating with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, I can't stop philosophizing about pretty much everything, since I've gotten so used to having to do it in school. Plato theorized that when something is fundamental to what you are, and you have an overabundance of it, it overflows and forces you to create. Since this can have annoying interpersonal consequences when a few loved ones have to put up with it constantly, this blog shall be a place where I can let it out, safely an productively. Facebook was OK for this, but here I can reach a wider audience, and Facebook's EULA is a bit dodgy regarding content ownership. Welcome to the Safety Valve!

About me: First and foremost, Anthony DuClare is a pen name, which I first used in a technical writing essay contest in school. I hold a bachelor's degree in Philosophy, the rank of Eagle Scout, national registration and state licensure as an EMT-Basic (pursuing Paramedic), and a concealed carry permit. My politics are best described as libertarian, though people would occasionally accuse me of being a fascist, social Darwinist, or Anglican establishmentarianist. I'm complicated like that. Law school somewhere down the road is likely.

You will likely see me considering diverse topics such as entertainment, EMS, firearms, politics and law, selective technology use, religion, and environmental and technological ethics. Have fun.