Blackmoor Vituperative

While you’re at it, if you’re trying to run the most failed presidency ever, a really good idea is to campaign in the grandest terms possible, and then deliver squat. You know, talk about bending the arc of history. Invoke Martin Luther King’s dream and his struggles and even those of the slaves. Ring the big bells of generational calling. Remind voters every thirty seconds that the country badly needs “Change!”. Then get elected and turn around and continue the policies of your hated predecessor in every meaningful policy area. Only with less conviction. People will love that.

(from How to Squander the Presidency in One Year, Common Dreams)

Dear Congress:

A few weeks ago, the Bakersfield, CA airport was closed because TSA agents became hysterical at the site of honey in a bottle. Just recently, a New York-to-Kentucky flight was diverted to Philadelphia because a Jewish passenger started to pray. Simply getting on an airplane has become a dehumanizing and all-too-often humiliating experience — and it serves no useful purpose.

This is ridiculous. None of this makes us safer. All it does is make airplane travel more tedious, more expensive — and more unlikely, if the traveler has any choice in the matter.

One or two well-publicized incidents do not change the fact that air travel is far, far, far safer than driving. More people die in car crashes in one month than have died in airplane crashes in the past decade (including the ones on September 11, 2001).

Please abolish the TSA, stop the wild-eyed fearmongering, and allow us to go back to traveling the “friendly skies”.

Kind regards,
An American Traveler

You need to listen to this, all the way to the end. This is more than a bit of audiophile trivia. It is a compelling statement on our cultural future if we do not take action — decisive, sweeping action — to break the stranglehold with which the media robber barons and the Digital Rights Mafia have gripped our cultural heritage.

Gamers, let’s band together and see how much we can raise to help the people of Haiti.

Donate $20 and get a coupon for over a thousand dollars in RPG titles. After you make the donation, you will receive the coupon code in your email. It will also be available in your order history.

A listing of the free products available with this coupon can be found on our Gamers Help Haiti page.

(from Drive-Thru RPG)

Dixie Sommers, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, recites a list of the 10 occupations that the BLS expects will provide the greatest number of new jobs over the next decade. The bad news? Six of the top seven fastest-growing occupations are low-skill, low-wage jobs.

Not great news for me. IT has become a commodity for businesses, much like janitorial service or payroll — a necessary expense, and one which a great many people are willing to provide, aggressively competing on price in the process. The days when legions of businesses were scrambling to hire the best and brightest IT people for a competitive advantage are over. We have become temps.

There is no sense in gnashing our teeth, tearing our clothes, and bemoaning a changing society. As with buggy whips and “copyright”, the days of earning a lot of money just by goofing around with computers is gone — whether or not people want to admit it.

So, what to do? Change fields entirely? I have not the stomach for the health care industry, so that’s right out. Switch from Computer Science to Accounting, perhaps?

Or perhaps find a niche that will allow me to struggle on, perhaps not quite as comfortably, but still in the field that I love. Perhaps I should strive to break into auditing, and work toward a CISA certification.

I am not certain. What I do know is that I will not be able to continue on the path I am on. It was paradise while it lasted, but nothing lasts forever.

The journalists in Mindanao are asking the authorities to allow them to carry firearms for self-protection.

After learning a bitter lesson from the tragedy of the Maguindanao massacre on November 23 where 57 people were murdered in cold blood at the Ampatuan town, 31 of whom were members of the media, “the advocacy for arming of reporters by many members of the Fourth Estate in the South has intensified,” according to a high official of a media organization on Tuesday.

John Felix Unson, chairman of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) for Central Mindanao, said “there has been a long record of killings of reporters in provinces and cities around Maguindanao.”

Unson who writes for Philippine Star was himself ambushed in Cotabato City by unidentified armed men on May 28, 1999. He had his caliber .357 mm [sic] revolver with him at the time and was able to return fire. The armed men retreated. Not a single bullet they fired hit the journalist.

[…]

“The best way for us to protect ourselves is to arm ourselves because neither the police nor the military can give us protection on a 24-hour, round-the-clock basis,” said Macabalang, now executive director of the Bureau of Public Information in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

(from Mindanao journalists want to carry guns, The Manila Times)

I hear you, Macabalang. I hear you.

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.