Superman

I am watching the Superman reboot from a few years back on cable. (There is nothing else on) I still don't like the casting of Superman. I hated Lois at first, but she's better the second time around. The revelation for me this time is Costner's Pa Kent. I can't believe I'm typing this, but he's the definitive Pa Kent on film.

"We Need Help"

"We Need Help", read the hand lettered sign posted at a village in Nepal after the earthquake. I bet they do. But my first thought was...why is this sign written in English? There are half a dozen languages in Nepal, none of them English..so they weren't asking their government or neighbors for help. They weren't asking for help from their Chinese overlords.

They were asking for help from us, America, just like everyone else does when something bad happens to them, whether it is a volcano or Hitler. 

The sick part of it is, six months later they'll be back to talking shit about us.

Bruce Jenner

Someone asked Rick Santorum about Bruce Jenner today. Since Santorum has a reputation (unfairly in my view) as being a judgemental, holier-than- thou, rightwing Christian I suspect they were hoping for and expecting some juicy condemnation. Instead, Santorum said: .“If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman,"

No, he's not. Jenner may feel like a woman, but he is still a man. If he has re-assignment surgery, he will still be a man, just one who has had some pretty drastic plastic surgery.

By the way, according to his second wife, this is not some ratings ploy. She says he actually began transitioning to a woman thirty years ago.

Finally Some Good News....

Things haven't been going so great the last decade. Ever since the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006 things have been going from bad to worse. However two stories this week have begun to restore my faith in the American people.

First you had the response to the attack by the Social Justice Warriors (SJW) on the pizzeria in Indiana. The mob was in full force against this poor family. But the american people have demonstrated which side they are on. A crowd funding site was set up, and in a little more than a day over $750,000 was donated directly to this family. That's probably over ten years worth of profits from their pizzeria. This was clearly a big fuck you to the intolerant Left.

The second story was the overwhelming success of the sad puppies and rabid puppies movements in Sci Fi. Sci Fi in general, and the Hugo Awards in particular, have been co-opted by a vocal SJW minority. Three years ago, rightwing authors in favor of free speech and open debate, began pushing back. This year they have truimphed, dominating the Hugo Awards nominations, and nearly shutting the SJW brigade out.

Stargate SG-1; Season 1; Episode 1 "Children of the Gods: Part 1"

Ok...just decided to watch these to kill some time since I get them free on Amazon Prime. I'm going to do a little write up on each episode as I watch them. I have seen the movie, (a while ago, and I wasn't paying particular attention) so I know the general plot. OK..episode 1.

First of all, this originally aired in July of 1997, and it shows. Much of the production values would be completely unacceptable today, and even the cuts are distracting. That said, the special effect for the gate is very effective. The wormhole effect is disturbing, and I predict that special effect will be lost very early in the series. (as does the "chill" effect apparently...I don't remember it in later episodes.) There are some glaring uniform problems in this episode, including uniforms with both officer and enlisted rank insignia on them. Hopefully this will get better quickly. Lots of explicit violence and blood....I don't remember any outcry at the time. The second wormhole effect was much shorter. This planet is apparently a Rome cognate.

OK...not bad. The major characters get introduced, broad plot line established.

That Explains a Lot......

I am a public school teacher in California. Today as I was preparing a lesson plan, I noticed that the high school history textbook I am using mentions the Sixteenth Amendment exactly twice:

Once when they printed the text of the U.S. Constution, and a second time that I will share in its entirety.

"Federal Income Tax. With lower tariff rates, the federal government had to replace the revenue that tariffs had previously supplied. Ratified in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment legalized a graduated income tax, which provided revenue by taxing individual earnings and corporate profits.

Under this graduated tax, larger incomes were taxed at higher rates than smaller incomes. The tax began with a modest tax on family incomes over $4,000 and ranged from 1 percent to a maximum of 6 percent on incomes over $500,000. Initially, few congressmen realized the potential of the income tax, but by 1917, the government was receiving more money on the income tax than it had ever gained from tariffs. today, income taxes on corporations and individuals represent the federal government's main source of revenue."

Who "Lost" the War on Poverty?

There are an increasing number of people discussing the failure of the War on Poverty to end poverty over the last 50 years. While it is true that poverty still exists, that is not due to the failure to improve the lives of the poor. Instead there are three reasons why there are just as many poor still among us, despite the trillions we have spent, and the millions who have improved their lives.

The first, most obvious, and mostly ignored reason is that we keep importing other countries' poor people, somewhere between 15 and 20 million of them in the last 25 years. That's between 5% and 10% of our population. These people are mostly uneducated peasants unprepared (and often unwilling because they are here illegally) to operate in a modern society. Instead, they bring their native countries' pathologies with them. To make things worse, usually any wealth they accumulate is sent back to their native country to either subsidize the lives of people there, or worse, pay for them to come here also.

The second reason is the breakdown of the family. The breakdown is due to both government policies and cultural shifts. The breakdown of the family over the last 50 years has produced generations of governmental dependence and a permanent culture of failure. In successful cultures, dependence on handouts is seen as disgraceful, or at least embarrassing. In failed cultures, the opposite is true. People who fail to take as many handouts as possible are seen as suckers. A significant number of the poor in the United States today have not only been poor for generations, but the same is true for everyone they know.

The third reason is that we keep changing the goal line. It is entirely possible for people to be considered poor by the government today, that have a standard of living that would have been considered wealthy by the standards when LBJ started his war on poverty. The biggest problem facing the poor in the United States today is obesity!

We need to come to the realization that despite our best efforts, there is always going to be an underclass (especially with open borders) that is ignorant, functionally illiterate, actually hostile to the culture of success, steeped in the culture of victimization, and loudly demanding the government provide them an increasingly higher standard of living. The question is, what do we do with them? I am stumped. While I abhor their solutions and ideology, you have to give the Progressives credit for thinking about this problem back in the 1920's. The modern Left has simply decided to abuse and manipulate this underclass for political power.

Things Taken For Granted

We take so much of our lives today for granted. Our daily lives are full of man made miracles that have become mundane. We expect the lights to come on, the water to run etc. But we also calmly accept and deal with terrors.

Everyday, millions of Americans, much of them either self medicating themselves with caffiene (or desperately needing to do so), a rather large percent of them distracted by activities such as texting, putting on their make up or badly playing the air guitar to their favorite song, successfully manage to operate several tons of machinery, at high speeds, with very little space between them with remarkably little loss of life or property damage.

Here's some bonus food for thought. The next time someone starts talking about flying cars.......imagine all of those idiots next to you on the freeway flying next to you instead.

Nov. 6, 2012

Ya'll grasshoppers better bring guns this time......

Prediction Election 2012

I've already made this prediction in several other places, but here for the record is my prediction:

Romney will beat Obama at least as badly as Obama beat McCain

Republicans will keep the House, and take the Senate

Aiken will even win in Missouri.

Update 11/6/12:

Well I, and the American people, sure blew that one.

I guess we'll find out if the Chinese will really let us go $20 trillion in debt.

The End of the Beginning?

I just watched the livestream of the launch of the SpaceX mission to the International Space Station (ISS). (As an aside, just how fantastic is that fact? I can stream live high definition video over the internet! I remember taking vacumn tubes out of the back of my TV set to take down to the drug store to replace!) This launch is being almost totally ignored by the MSM and popular culture. However I believe that one day, this will be seen as a turning point, a twenty-first century golden spike if you will. For the first time, a totally private company has launched a reusable spacecraft on a commercial mission. I frankly don't know whether the geek or the historian in me is more excited.

Little Fuzzy

I just got through reading all three of Piper's stories about the Fuzzies in an omnibus edition called The Complete Fuzzy. In a previous post I discussed the Fuzzy books and expressed my opposition to the Scalzi re-boot called Fuzzy Nation. Well, after re-reading the original books I begin to understand.

First of all, I am officially predicting a movie project, probably something CGI dominated like Avatar.

Secondly, the original books are obvious artifacts of their time. The first two were published in the early 1960's, but I'd be willing to bet that they had been originally written in the 1950's, they definitely have a 50's vibe to them. The main "corporate" characters in the book could have come straight out of Madmen, and almost every chapter has a reference to "cocktail hour". The most "objectionable" part to most people however is the relationship between humans and fuzzies. It is pretty condescending and patronizing. ( I seem to remember the Mayhar book dealing with this and attempting to disarm it) I could easily see some Phd writing a monograph comparing the humans to Europeans and the fuzzies to those colonized by the Europeans. I fully expect Scalzi's fuzzies to be much more "mature" and capable than Piper's fuzzies.

Thirdly, Piper's vision of future technology was severely limited. In fact I can see a viable argument that Piper's fuzzy books aren't science fiction at all. I seem to remember Tuning's and Mayhar's books being more science fiction, however they are no longer cannon since the publication of the third Piper book. It will be interesting to see if either Scalzi's book, or the Diehr book include any part of Mayhar's or Tuning's work.

I would also be interested to see if Piper's fuzzies had anything to do with David Weber's treecats. If I ever get a chance to ask to Weber about it I will.

T.D.I.M. - Mar 28, 1980

The number one song on this date in 1980 was Another Brick in the Wall (Part II) by Pink Floyd. This song came off the famous (infamous?) The Wall album. The album would later be turned into a musical featuring extended animation scenes. The clip of the song below is taken from the movie.

T.D.H. - Mar 28

This date was a good date for beer drinkers in the United States. First, on this date in 1836, Frederick Pabst was born in Germany. He would later move to America and marry a Brewer's daughter. He eventually bought into the business. He would go on to greatly expand the business and name it after himself. Pabst would become a major figure in the beer industry and the city of Milwaukee.


On this date in 1899, August Anheuser Busch, Jr was born. He would take control of the Anheuser-Busch brewery from his older brother and make it the largest brewery in the world. He was the grandson of the brewery's founder, and his grandson is currently the CEO of the company. He was the one who introduced the Clydesdale horses to the Budweiser image. He also bought the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.

American Exceptionalism

I have just finished watching a video on American Exceptionalism by Bill Whittle. Far too often I hear the Left make the argument that there is nothing special about the United States, that we are just one of what will soon be 196 nations. (Man, I remember thinking that 156 was a large number when I was doing M.U.N. in high school)

The Right knows that in fact the United States is exceptional, and has been for most of its history. Everything from the peaceful transfer of power from President Washington to President Adams, (and more importantly and more impressively from President Adams to President Jefferson) to the Berlin airlift to America's efforts to help Japan after the recent earthquake and tsunami. It is a simple, easily understood fact...we are exceptional. History will judge us so too, for many of the reasons that Whittle discusses in his video.

The Left cannot acknowledge that America is exceptional, because their whole ideology is based on fundamentally changing America, which would be idiotic if indeed America was exceptional. A few might attempt to argue that they are trying to make America more exceptional than it already is. My response is to ask them why they are trying to make the United States more like Europe? There are places in Europe that still don't have peaceful transfers of power, especially among political enemies. How many European planes flew into Berlin during that crisis? How many European aircraft carriers or helicopter carriers are off the coast of Japan providing relief?

The simple fact is, our goal should be to transform the rest of the world to more closely resemble the United States rather than transform the United States to look like the rest of the world.

And for those of you who lived in the United Kingdom with me back in the 80's...which UK would you rather live in? The one of the 1980's or the one that exists today?

T.D.I.H. - Mar 27

On this date in 1915, Typhoid Mary was put into permanent involuntary quarantine. Her name was Mary Mallon. She was an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook. She spread typhoid to her clients, there are at least seven recorded instances of the families she worked for coming down with the disease. She denied that she was the source of the disease. She was previously quarantined for a three year period, but released when she promised to no longer work as a cook, and take precautions not to spread the disease. She violated both of these promises. She died while being held, and spent almost thirty years in quarantine. After death, the typhoid virus was found in her organs, and it is presumed that she caught the disease before birth from her mother.

T.D.A.T.M. - Mar 26, 2000

The number one movie on this date in the US continued to be Erin Brokovich. I generally love Julia roberts movies, but this one turned me off from the start, and I have never seen more than a 10 min clip of it. If the clip below of someones ten funniest moments from the movie is accurate, I haven't missed much. It appears to mainly be clips of Julia cussing.

T.D.I.H. - Mar 26

On this date in 1830, the Book Of Mormon was first published. The Book of Mormon is a sacred text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other smaller related religious movements. The commonly used name to describe these churches, Mormon, obviously comes from the title of this book. Many Mormons believe that this is a historical record of Jesus in the new world, copied by Joseph Smith from golden plates. Other Mormons believe that Smith was inspiried by God to create this book.

T.D.A.T.M. - Mar 25, 1990

The number one movie on this date in the US was Pretty Woman. I have definitely seen this one. In fact if I am channel surfing and hit this movie, I stop and watch it. Again. I think Richard Gere and Julia Roberts had a good chemistry, and I wish we had seen more of Laura San Giacomo. Hector Elizondo was perfect, but I think Jason Alexander was miscast. I think Tom Arnold would have been better in the role for instance. After watching it just now, this is one of those trailers that basically tells the whole movie.......

T.D.I.H. - Mar 25

This date is officially "Tolkien Reading Day". I've read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Once. I tried The Silmarillion, and didn't make it half through. I appreciate the artistic merit of Tolkien. I just think he's boring as hell. The movies were OK though...beautiful cinematography.