Blackmoor Vituperative

While on the topic of “race”, this crossed my desk this morning…

(NECN/WFLD) – Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich apologized this morning for saying in an Esquire Magazine interview that he was “blacker than Barack Obama.”

Blagojevich, in front of his home in Chicago, told reporters it was a poor way of expressing what he wanted to say. In the interview hitting stands this week Blagojevich made this statement: “I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in the black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.”

(from Blagojevish apologizes for ‘blacker than Obama’ remark , NECN)

Personally, I think Blagojevish made a good point about the obsession with skin color in this country — not even skin color, but a completely arbitary “ethnicity” which has no relevance to a person’s actual character, background, or accomplishments. The way our media and our society treat appearance as more important than substance is an embarrassment. I may get vilified for saying so, but I do not think he should have apologized — not for that statement, anyway.

I wish he would get a haircut, though.

Apparently some people have chosen to interpret the theme of James Cameron’s Ferngully remake, Avatar, as racist.

The theme of the outsider who arrives, becomes an insider, and then helps save them, is about as anti-racist a theme as one is likely to find. The Thirteenth Warrior had the same theme (Arab becomes accepted among Norse barbarians), as did the recent remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (alien decides not to destroy humanity). Even Twilight has a touch of that theme. This theme goes back at least as far as Beowulf (a Geat hero among Danes — and the story which inspired The Thirteenth Warrior), if not further.

People who cherry-pick their examples only to include races against which they have a grudge, and then use that as evidence of some kind of racist message, really need to examine their motives, imo. The message isn’t about “race” at all. It’s about crossing cultural boundaries. It’s about synthesis.

Yes, the human “saviour” in Avatar could do things the Na’vi couldn’t — because he would do them. He was not constrained by their assumptions about what was possible or proper (praying to the tree/planet/god, capturing a big red bird, etc.). But anyone who thinks that the Na’vi did not also teach him things completely misses the point. He was able to accomplish more as one of the Na’vi than he could ever have done as a human — and not just because he was big and blue.

We watch a lot of bad movies. Some are good, most are bad, and some are so bad they are funny (I laughed the whole way through 2012). I expected Arachnia to fall into the “bad” category. I was surprised to discover that Arachnia is actually a fun, low-budget monster movie.

The monsters in Arachnia are large spider-like stop-motion creations, like something from the 1950s. Other than a lack of color (the monsters are uniformly grey-brown), the stop-motion effects are reasonably well done for a low budget movie. The characters are distinctive, the acting is not too shabby, and the writing is actually pretty good. We chuckled several times, not just at the movie, but with the movie. There are even a few nude scenes (which I like, in principle), but rather than the awkward, uncomfortable to watch, overtly sexual and yet completely non-erotic scenes you get in movies like Final Examination, Arachnia has a sense of innocent fun. One of the times we laughed was actually during one of the nude scenes, and this was not a “laughing because it is so bad” moment, but a moment of intentional humor. How rare that is!

So, for monsters, humor, and fun nudes scenes, I give this movie four out of five stars.

Trivia: Arachnia was made by Edgewood Studios, the same Vermont folks who gave us Time Chasers.

We watch a lot of movies. Most of them are not very good. We recently saw a Belgian-French-German movie called Daughters of Darkness, which was really quite good. Images has a pretty good review of it.

This is for any potential employers or hiring managers who might take the trouble to Google me before scheduling me for an interview: I do not sign covenants not to compete. If you do not want me to use my skills for the benefit of your competitor, then treat me honorably and pay me fairly. It is just that simple.

There is an implicit assumption behind these “noncompetes” that the employer’s needs and wants are more important than those of the employee. Employer-employee is a business relationship. Each gives something. Each gets something. They are equals. Any agreement of any kind that favors one over the other should be rejected out of hand.

Have you ever seen a noncompete where the employer is forbidden from replacing the employee for six months if they leave? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. So why do people sign promises that they will be unemployed for six months after leaving a company?

When I was younger and more easily intimidated, I would sign nearly anything an employer asked me to sign. I am older and wiser now. If the agreement does not treat both parties fairly, I don’t agree to it.

Note that a covenant not to compete is not the same thing as a nondisclosure agreement. Preserving the trade secrets of a previous employer is just ordinary ethical behavior, and I have and will preserve those secrets with or without a nondisclosure agreement. Since signing a nondisclosure agreement will not alter my behavior in any way, I will cheerfully sign one — as long as it is a nondisclosure agreement. At least one potential employer has asked me to sign a “nondisclosure agreement” which was, in fact, a covenant not to compete. I suspect the irony of that attempted deception was lost on them.

NEW YORK – The home of superheroes including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men sued one of its most successful artists Friday to retain the rights to the lucrative characters.

The federal lawsuit filed Friday in Manhattan by Marvel Worldwide Inc. asks a judge to invalidate 45 notices sent by the heirs of artist Jack Kirby to try to terminate Marvel’s copyrights, effective on dates ranging from 2014 through 2019.

The heirs notified several companies last year that the rights to the characters would revert from Marvel to Kirby’s estate.

The lawsuit said Kirby’s work on the comics published between 1958 and 1963 were “for hire” and render the heirs’ claims invalid. The famed artist died in 1994.

(from Marvel sues to keep Spider-Man, X-Men copyrights – Yahoo! News, Yahoo)

It’s no surprise that Disney (of which Marvel is a subsidiary) would oppose the loss of any of its copyrights. Disney has built its empire on appropriating public domain works and then twisting our copyright laws so that they never lose control of them. What is truly absurd about these dueling lawsuits is that anyone owns the copyright to work created over fifty years ago, the creator of which died over a decade ago.

I am watching the special features on the “Revenge of The Sith” DVD, the third of the second set of Star Wars sequels.

People in the special features keep referring to how Lucas doesn’t know what he wants until he sees it, and that they just keep generating scenes and hope that eventually Lucas will string the pieces together to make a movie. “That’s what it’s like to work with George.” They come right out and say this, over and over.

He even says it, although he phrases it differently.

It’s hilarious to hear George Lucas talking about how if he had more control over Star Wars (the first movie), that X would have been Y, and W would have been Z, etc. Essentially, that if he’d had his way, Darth Vader would have been a huge puss all along and that Star Wars would have sucked.

How freaking delusional can one person be?

A word of warning to those of you who rely on hardware-based encrypted USB flash drives. Security firm SySS has reportedly cracked the AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption used on flash drives manufactured by Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim.

The crack relies on a weakness so astoundingly bone-headed that it’s almost hard to believe. While the data on the drive is indeed encrypted using 256-bit crypto, there’s a huge failure in the authentication program. When the correct password is supplied by the user, the authentication program always send the same character string to the drive to decrypt the data no matter what the password used. What’s also staggering is that this character string is the same for Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim USB flash drives.

Cracking the drives is therefore quite an easy process. The folks at SySS wrote an application that always sent the appropriate string to the drive, irrespective of the password entered, and therefore gained immediate access to all the data on the drive.

(from Encryption busted on NIST-certified Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim USB flash drives, ZDNet)

This is what we have come to: TSA security guards become so hysterical that they have to be hospitalized, and an entire airport is shut down, because a passenger wants to take some raw honey home with him from his sister’s.

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — The suspicious material found inside luggage that prompted the shutdown of a California airport Tuesday morning turned out to be five soft drink bottles filled with honey, authorities said.

A passenger’s suitcase tested positive for TNT at Bakersfield’s Meadows Field during a routine swabbing of the bag’s exterior, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said. When security officials opened the bag, they found bottles filled with an amber liquid, he said.

“Why in this day and age would someone take a chance carrying honey in Gatorade bottles?” Youngblood asked. “That itself is an alarm. It’s hard to understand.”

Investigators said the bag’s owner, Francisco Ramirez, 31, is a gardener from Milwaukee who has been cooperating with authorities. He flew to Bakersfield Dec. 23 to spend Christmas with his sister and was returning Tuesday when the alarm sounded.

When Transportation Security Administration agents opened one of the bottles and tested the contents, the resulting fumes nauseated them, Youngblood said. Both were treated and released at a local hospital.

“It’s encouraging that the system did work, because something is not right there,” Youngblood said. “The system worked the way it was supposed to, but it just takes time when you close an airport — and it costs a lot of money.”

All flights into and out of Meadows Field were canceled for much of Tuesday as authorities searched the terminal for other potential explosives.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office bomb squad was expected to perform further tests on the honey to determine why at least two false positives were recorded for both TNT and the organic explosive acetone peroxide, or TATP. Bakersfield is about 110 miles north of Los Angeles.

Investigators want to know whether any chemical Ramirez uses in his gardening work could have left traces of potential explosives. They will also run tests on the honey to see if the smoke beekeepers use to subdue the insects could have triggered the false positive test.

Ramirez was not arrested Tuesday. Authorities initially quesitoned his immigration status, but said later he is a legal, permanent resident of the U.S.

“I suspect after this he won’t want to eat honey again, ever,” Youngblood said.

(from California Authorities Say Bottles of Honey Caused Airport Shutdown, Fox News)

Are we ready to call “bullshit” on this nonsense yet, and go back to flying without being terrified into hysteria by bottles of honey? Nothing the TSA has been doing or currently does makes the slightest difference in how safe or how dangerous airplane travel is. Either strip everyone naked, gas them unconscious, and make them spend the whole trip locked in transparent coffins, or leave us the hell alone and let us fly and take our chances.

Please write to your Senators and Representative and ask them to do away with this nonsense.

And someone please tell Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood to shut the hell up, because he is making law enforcement — real law enforcement, not TSA rent-a-cops — sound like idiots.

The cant of thieves runs thick and swift through our times, a river of melody cajoling the fools and feckless into greater abandon of their father’s house. We have forgotten our faces, go and reacquaint yourselves with the men and women who forged this fine country, absorb their clear ideas of freedom and abandon every false thing you’ve been fed by the political parties that dominate our failing country and debased culture. If you are able to cast off the decades long chains of ingrained lies, you can still save the country.

(from The Cant Of Thieves, Jaded Haven)