Darth Vader's Birth Certificate

I just discovered a really funny, and kinda disturbing, website, done up to look like a news site. It's a little like The Onion, except narrower, geekier, and perhaps a little creepier. Good art.  Very professional, and well worth reading for myriad laughs.

Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead, Vader Says

CORUSCANT — Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock.
...
Lord Vader has denied requests to present photographs of the body, describing them as "too gruesome" for the general public. 

As you can see, it puts an interesting reflection on the recent death of Bin Laden. It's a little eerie just how easy it is to picture the Empire spinning Kenobi's death till it looks just like the recent news in our own world.  And the site goes on from there making further parallels, going so far as to host several pages of fake/in-character comments from the public about Imperial politics, Vader's birth certificate, the lack of body, the various Star Wars tragedies being an inside job, etc. Really funny.

Airport Security

If I were a pedophile (or just sexual predator in general), I'd apply for a job at the TSA. Getting paid money for groping folks all day long, that'd be sweet. For a sick fucking perv.

If I were a terrorist, I'd be thrilled with the long lines at the Airports. It used to be that to use a bomb to kill hundreds of Americans and disrupt transportation, you had to smuggle the bomb through airport security. Now that the TSA and DHS's "safety" procedures have lengthened the time you spend in lines at the airport, and conveniently packed more Americans per square foot into the kill zone, you could just detonate a bomb inside the airport itself. Psychopaths and religious extremists alike must be very encouraged at the potential to blow up people in lines outside the security checkpoint.

But alas, I am neither a terrorist nor a molester, so instead of being happy I find myself angry and critical of our government.

I'm a cancer survivor, so it wouldn't be particularly smart or safe for me to go through backscatter x-ray scanners if I can reasonably avoid doing so.

I'm also a sexual abuse survivor, so I probably wouldn't want to opt-out of the scans and have to get an invasive pat-down of my genitals (to make sure I hadn't wired my penis to explode).

I guess I'll just have to opt out of flying all together.  Wow.  Thanks, TSA and DHS, I feel safer already!

Shadow Government

Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about ‘line’ it ’should not cross’

The first thing I think when I see that headline is "Holy crap! Dr. Who is part of the Conspiracy? Now we're really fucked!" But, apparently it's spelled David Tennant. See, if I look over here on Wikipedia, I... who the hell is Matt Smith? Damnit! That's what I get for canceling my cable.

Ahem.

Back to the original article... the ACLU has managed to get their hands on a letter from the Bush Administration to the 9/11 Commission, in which the Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and Head of the CIA refused the Commission's request to interview detainees.

"There is, however, a line that the Commission should not cross... The Commission staff's proposed participation in questioning of detainees would cross that line,"

That's a little ominous, eh? Who knows what it means. Even if it was just an innocent but poor choice of phrasing, it probably had a chilling effect on the people tasked with uncovering how our government failed. I mean if Ashcroft and Rumsfeld and Dr. Who told me I was about to cross a line, I'd shut the heck up and listen to them.

Why would the Bush Administration not want the 9/11 Commissioners anywhere near detained suspects in the 9/11 plot? Perhaps to keep the truth hidden about 9/11? Or maybe just to keep the truth hidden about how much torture was being used on detainees? Either seems believable, ...and disgustingly reprehensible.

Smoking gun though it may seem to be, this letter on it's own proves nothing... but it certainly justifies looking a little deeper. I think it's time for a new investigation into the shadier policies and activities of the previous administration, one that doesn't have to obey arbitrary limitations placed on it by the very government it's investigating. Shine a little light in there, and see what goes scurrying back into the deeper shadows. (...like on that Library planet. Or to see what just stands there like those statues in that episode "Blink". They were almost as creepy as Rumsfeld.)

Holding him accountable

Good news for those (like myself) who wish to see the war crimes of the recent administrations punished:

Judge allows lawsuit against Rumsfeld over torture of US citizens

US District Judge Wayne R. Andersen said the plaintiffs had provided enough concrete evidence of torture to allow the suit to go forward. The judge dismissed Rumsfeld's arguments that his position near the top of the executive branch immunized him from lawsuits involving the authorization of torture

Too bad our courts only seem to care if it's US citizens that we torture, but at least this is better than condoning every act of butchery.

Perhaps this will open some doors for Bugliosi's campaign to put Bush on trial for murder.

W(isolea)TF?

I was in a department store the other day, and I took a moment to wander through their toy section. There's this big display of Star Wars action figures. Including a figure Wisolea, who looks like this:

The action figure looked a little less ridiculous than that photo - but not much. You got this bizarre alien head with eyes all over the place, and these two long limp tentacles that just hang there - atop a perfectly human-looking body.

I had to gawk. I flip over the back of the package, to find out what part of the "expanded universe" this awful monstrosity came from.

It tells me this character is from Episode IV? Supposedly it's the merchant that bought Luke's Landspeeder for 2,000 credits.

I couldn't completely believe that. I don't remember seeing it on film, and the only image of the thing I can find online is clearly a bad pre-photoshop paste job. Someone took a colorized poster featuring b-movie horror monster, and just glued it over Obi-Wan's face. It's an illustrated head on a photographed body!

But it gets worse. The box claimed (and Wookiepedia confirms) that the critter only paid the 2000 credits it did because Obi-Wan used a Jedi Mind Trick on it to fool it into paying more than the speeder was worth.

God dammit, George Lucas! What the hell is wrong with you (and your merchandising Empire)? When Qui-Gon abuses the force to fleece Watto, the viewer can almost justify that, seeing as how Watto is a low-life and a slave-owner. Almost justified. At least the scene is kinda funny. It's still sad to see a Jedi behaving like a con-man, but it's not like anyone with any taste or intelligence considers Phantom Menace to be cannonical. We all just kinda try to pretend it doesn't exist. It communicates volumes about Lucas's takes on philosophy, morality, personal profit, and storytelling.

But, dammit, to retcon this sort of crap into one of the films that we all still love and adore? I'm insulted. Worse, Luke complains in A New Hope about how he didn't get much for his Landspeeder, that they weren't in demand since the new model came out. I get that Luke's whinny, but seriously, this retcon means he's bitching even though Obi-Wan just swindled the vendor to get that money. It's not like Luke could miss that, since in the previous scene, Obi-Wan, sitting in the Landspeeder, had done the "these aren't the droids you're looking for" trick, and explained how it worked to Luke. You've just retroactively made Luke stupid.

Thanks a lot, Lucas. I really needed you to piss all over my childhood yet again, and you and your money-machine were all too happy to oblige me.

How To Tell An Inglourious War Story (updated and expanded)

When I posted this the other day, it had been three little paragraphs. I don't think that did the film justice, nor was it terribly helpful to someone trying to decide if they should see the movie. So, here's a much longer version...


It has been a long time since a film has made me so uncomfortable, and yet simultaneously so awe-struck and impressed... in fact the only thing comparable was the first time I saw Eraserhead. Unlike Tarantino's other work, Basterds is not a "fun" movie - or not as fun, anyway - and it makes Kill Bill look family-friendly. I squirmed, I felt ill, I laughed at things I really shouldn't have, and I'm almost ashamed to admit I enjoyed it. At the same time, it was genius. I'm glad he had the courage to make it, and I'm glad I saw it in the theatre without anyone spoiling it. Well worth watching, provided you like it when films challenge you. This one will.

It's not, as Lt Raines claims it is, his masterpiece. IMHO, it may even be his weakest work, the only film of his that I don't feel the need to own. Then again, liking his films more with every viewing is par for the course - and it's not the first Tarantino film that seemed shocking on first viewing, either. It's also a film that's guaranteed to be viewed entirely differently on second watching.

Comparing it to work by other artists... I didn't really care for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, but I love Going After Cacciato , so perhaps it makes sense that I'm so conflicted over this.

Like Cacciato, (and Cacciato's sister-short-story, How To Tell A True War Story), you know this tale is fictional, fantastically so, yet it really catches a truthful and accurate feel of the special kind of hell that is war. Depictions of the reality of war are rare in cinema - war's ugly, not heroic, and films avoid that reality. Even films that attempt to do justice to that concept (Saving Private Ryan, for example), tend to fall prey to overblown notions of heroism and morality, both of which are frequently absent in a war zone. In Basterds, you see good men doing very bad things, and sometimes you even see very bad men doing good things. You also see crazy coincidences that are completely unbelievable, yet are exactly like the type of crazy coincidences that actually happen in the real world, especially in the haze of combat. The events in this film didn't happen, but could have. In this way it's unlike most war movies, which didn't happen, and are far too sanitary to have ever happened, either.

Like Good/Bad/Ugly, the film has plenty of slow artful simmer, juxtaposed close-ups and long shots, and strong musical choices. Basterds really is a Sergio Leone Western in WWII clothing - it uses the same tropes, but with Nazis instead of cowboy bandits. As in Leone's "man with no name" trilogy, there's extremely few characters you can actually like. They're basterds, every one of them.

Watching this film was delicious agony. Any Tarantino film is going to have a few things that make you uncomfortable. His films are packed with violence and tasteless racial epithets. It's only logical that's going to get more pronounced in a film with Nazis - they are genocidal racists, after all, an army of repugnant butchers, the ultimate villains.

In Reservoir Dogs, a man is tortured. But he's at least tortured by a "bad guy". You feel disgust and outrage, even while you're bopping along to Stuck In The Middle With You. You enjoy the scene, but despise the character at the heart of it. That was hard to swallow the first time I saw it. Inglourious Basterds is like that scene, blown up into a whole movie, and then it goes a step further...

Here, the "heroes" are torturers. Nazis are the ultimate villains, and it always feels good to see them get their comeuppance, or at least it always has in the past. Here they die in some ugly, brutal ways, at the hands of the heroes. If this film had come out 10 years ago, when torture was an abstract fantasy element that only happens in movies, I don't think I'd feel so conflicted. Post Abu Ghraib, it's just not acceptable to me for the hero to torture anyone - not even Nazis.

At the same time, this is a much healthier and more honest way of examining WWII than, say, what happens in an Indiana Jones film. In a Jones movie, the Nazis are bad just because of the uniform. We never really see the rank and file being villains, and the death of each human being in that uniform has no emotional weight. We can cheer as they die, without ever stopping to consider that a _human_ just died. In Basterds, on the other hand, the Nazis do really evil things. While the madness and villainy of their leadership is center stage, the complicity of the common man is starkly depicted as well. We can't deny they deserve what happens to them. They really got it coming, and we want them to be punished. At the same time, we get to see that they are most definitely human - they have lives beyond their uniforms, and some at least have a few redeeming qualities. Which demands the question - do we really want to see them get their comeuppance in such a brutal and ferociously honest way? The conclusion I came to by film's end was not just "yes", but "Hell, Yes!" - and that unsettles me.

And, if anything, recent history has shown us that, given official sanction to do so, otherwise good men will turn into monsters for their countries. So, distasteful as those elements of Basterds are, they are completely believable. As honest and truthful as they are gratuitous.

Lastly, it's worth mentioning that Inglourious Basterds has some classic Tarantino fun as well - references to various films, campy moments, post-modern flourishes, on-screen chapter titles, etc. - but to a slightly lesser degree than in Kill Bill. Time is also handled far more linearly in Basterds than in any other Tarantino-directed film. All of this may, possibly, be a contributing factor in my not liking it as much. In Kill Bill, the flourishes were more numerous, and emphasized the theme of the film. In Pulp Fiction, they were more subtle. In Basterds, they seemed less organic than either of those, and stand in contrast to the primary theme. If he'd just stuck to Western and War Movie iconography, and down-played the post-modern campiness, it _may_ have been a more cohesive film.

Even with these caveats and complaints, I'd still give Inglourious Basterds 4 out of 5 stars. It was less comfortable than his other work, but no less artistic. He took big risks in this artwork, most of which really paid off, and a few that didn't. I am impressed by the effort and intent.

About freakin' time!

via yahoo

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration launched a criminal investigation Monday into harsh questioning of detainees during President George W. Bush's war on terrorism, revealing CIA interrogators' threats to kill one suspect's children and to force another to watch his mother sexually assaulted.
...
Seeking information about possible further attacks, interrogators threatened one detainee with a gun and a power drill, choked another and tried to frighten still another with a mock execution of another prisoner.

I'd pretty much given up hope of this Administration ever doing anything about those damn murdering bastards at the Bush CIA. Happy to see something come of it.

Trolling for God - well, for Grades anyway

Here's a new wrinkle. Apparently, Trolling for McCain wasn't enough, nor was Trolling for the good ol' fashioned reason of "I'm just a jerk and it amuses me". No, apparently, it's now considered acceptable at certain schools to make Trolling a mandatory part of a class.

Here's an excerpt from a professor's syllabus at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a class called "Intelligent Design and Unintelligent Evolution"

AP410 This is the undegrad [sic] course. You have three things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 40% of your grade); (2) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 40% of your grade); (3) provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).

Emphasis mine.

So remember, the next time you want to unload on some dunderhead who's violently arguing nonsense on your favorite forum or blog - they might not genuinely want to ruin your day by crapping in your stream, they may just have to post it so they can get an "A" at divinity school.

Question on my mind: Does "A" stand for "Astroturf", or just "Asshole"?

Robomower

It's been a while since I've done any neoluddite ranting here. What with the LHC "down"* till September, and the latest thing threatening to destroy the world being natural / biological / stupid**, I've been quieter than usual. Let's see, what shall I rant about...

Robotic Lawnmowers.

Okay, I get the Roomba idea. Not having to do your own vacuuming is a big improvement on quality of life. Even with the sorry state of the world economy, you really can't hire someone to vacuum your house twice a week for the next two years for $149 to $199. So, I bow to this logic, and secretly envy those with short hair (because my long hair destroys vacuum cleaners).

I also understand the robot-on-the-assembly-line idea. It takes jobs away from good people, and thus contributes to the economic disaster we're wading through, but I see how it saves on expenses and would thus be desirable to our corporate overlords. Plus, a little bit of automation might reduce the risks to workers. So, I must grudgingly admit I see the logic there.

The lawnbot, however, is like the worst aspects of both ideas. You can hire some neighborhood kid to mow your lawn every week for a lot less than the $1,399 the cheapest robomower costs. Replacing him with a robot doesn't in any way reduce the danger in his life. Let's face it, most kids who see a robot mowing the neighbors lawn are going to test it's limits. They'll throw toys and rocks at it or in front of it. They'll build a ramp or jump. They'll flip it over to watch the blades spin. Then somebody pushes the fat or nerdy kid, he falls into it, and my wife ends up coding his insurance claims.

Oh, well then, that means job security for my wife in these lean times. Nevermind then. Please, continue to make robotic children-mowing machines.




*: I put "down" in quotation marks because I don't for a minute believe the LHC is offline. No, it just created a temporal gateway, and the facility is currently inundated with refugees from the future trying to escape the hell we've turned this planet in to. The UN has cordoned it off, and is trying to work out a solution to this dilemma. Unfortunately, the time machine only goes back to the moment is was turned on, so they can't escape to a time before we started destroying the planet. Not unless the dinosaurs also built an LHC, and died off because of competition with humans who fled through it into our primeval past. Hmm...

**: Interpret that as Swine Flu, or as North-Korea-related insanity (on our part or theirs), as you see fit.

Irretrievable Easter Egg

Thank you Brad for sharing how to make an irretrievable Easter egg.

Mind Control Robots

Had to double-check the date on this one, but it predates April Fools, so it seems to be legit.

Honda has new non-invasive brain-machine-interface technology:

TOKYO, Japan, March 31, 2009 - Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. (HRI-JP), a subsidiary of Honda R&D Co., Ltd., Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation have collaboratively developed the world’s first^*1 Brain Machine Interface (BMI) technology that uses electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) along with newly developed information extraction technology to enable control of a robot by human thought alone. It does not require any physical movement such as pressing buttons. This technology will be further developed for the application to human-friendly products in the future by integrating it with intelligent technologies and/or robotic technologies.

...

♦ About BMI
While conventional machine-interface uses devices such as switches which need to be operated by a user’s hands or feet, BMI uses brain activity data measured by various devices and enables non-contact control of the machines (such as robots). Invasive BMI, which is widely studied by U.S. and European researchers, requires the surgical implant of electrode arrays, whereas non-invasive BMI uses sensors touching the user’s scalp.

My evil plan is almost to fruition. The world will quake and cower when my army of psychic robots invades every home. I'd been considering this for a long time, but was previously held by by fear of losing humanity points when they install my neuroware processor. Now I can dominate humanity without loss of humanity.

Re: Blasphemy

Trying to pick a fight :), a friend recently posted this "Blasphemy" elsewhere. Because it might be fun, I decided I'd take the bait...

Batman is a boring superhero. He does nothing for me.

Lord of the Rings is generic, redundant, and gratuitous.

Star Wars Episodes I - III weren't that bad.

Matrix Reloaded was the best movie of the trilogy.

Heresy! Blasphemy! My dander is up! I feel the need to respond! Listen to me roar:

I agree with you on 2.8 out of your 4 points.

Oh, I guess that wasn't as much of a roar as I was expecting. I'll proceed point-by-point, and see if I can get motivated to argue about anything. No promises, though...

I'm probably not saying anything that wasn't said before by someone else, when I say:

• While Batman doesn't bore me, I do find that he appeals less to me than many other superheroes. I think it's because at his core, he's just a spoiled rich guy. I've never had much sympathy for the rich.
  He's also more vigilante than superhero, the attempts of the last few decades to make him darker and edgier have just turned me off to the character - but, admittedly, I'm still a film behind (and yes, I've cued it on netflix to remedy that).
  My biggest complaint about Bats is that he doesn't quite fit in to his own setting - all the villains are over-the-top goofyballs with superpowers, but he's just a bitter guy with expensive weapons. Would Wonder Woman still be cool without her lariat and invisiplane - hells yeah, 'cause she's super-strong, is descended from Gods, and she fought the Nazis. Would Aquaman still be cool without his... um... what's he got? A fishbowl? Without it, he'd still be good at... at... at bobbing for apples! Okay, so Bats is grudgingly cooler than Aquaman...
  I think the point I should be making is that I can appreciate several other superheroes more than I appreciate Batman, because I may one day be bitten by a radioactive spider - but we all know I ain't never gonna be rich.
  
  
• Star Wars Episodes II & III weren't that bad. Ewan McGregor channels Alec Guiness well, and it's awesome wish-fullfillment to see the Jedi battles, especially Yoda. Mace "My lightsaber's the one that says 'Bad Motherfucker' on it" Windu was icing on my cake.
  Episode I wasn't that bad, either, except for the fart joke... and the other parts with Jar Jar... and the Midichlorians... and most of Anakin's scenes... and Darth Maul may have looked cool, but he failed as a villain because he didn't do anything that was actually villainous until 3 seconds before he died. Okay, so it's clear that the things that most geeks loved about Eps 4-6 are not the same elements that Lucas loved about Hope to Jedi.
  That said, I agree that Eps 2 & 3 weren't that bad, and maybe 2 or 3 scenes of Ep 1 weren't bad, either. Could have been worse, too - he could have put Ewoks on every planet, or made Ep 3 revolve around "Darth Binks".
  
  
• Matrix Reloaded was indeed the best film of the trilogy, even with the 45-minute chase scene.
  Every time I watch the original Matrix, I can't shake the feeling like the first draft of the script ended with Trinity being The One. It must have just tested poorly with male audiences so they went with the boring and predictable Keanu-worshiping ending. Felt like they missed an opportunity to really make the script stand out. Reloaded works a little better for me as a result.
  Revolutions, on the other hand, sucked tactically-inept mech-ass. It may deserve a post of it's own for that rant.
  
  
• And now, Lord of the Rings... Here comes the part where I express my outrage. Generic, Redundant, and Gratuitous, huh?
  It ain't generic. The story may seem generic, but that's only because every fantasy novel, film, and RPG to have released since Tolkien has stolen from him. When it was first written, there was nothing generic about it. It's like calling the Wright Brother's first plane generic and unimpressive because every plane since then has had wings.
  Consider Dwarves in any other fantasy property - they're just short bearded people. Maybe they don't like elves. That's straight out of Tolkien, and Jackson knew how cliched it had become. So he built them a visual culture, based partly on passages from the book, but mostly just his own crew's imagination. We learn about Dwarves not just from Gimli's whiney monologues, but also from the knotwork on his axe and helmet, from the grandiose architecture, and from his peoples desire to hide in their mountains instead of martial an army against Sauron. Just one Dwarf on screen, but you could write a book about their culture as evidenced in the films. The same goes for the two enclaves of Elves, the many differing cultures of man, the hobbits - heck, even the Orcs get four different identifiable cultures! Four cultures of orc! The films are visually and culturally loaded - and thus as far from "generic" as any fantasy can be. The only way it could possibly be less generic would have been to take a lot more liberties with the story - and then our complaints would be rather different. I'm sorry friend, but you're smoking pipeweed when you call LOTR generic.
  Redundant and Gratuitous... well, if you're talking about Return of the King, I can't argue against your point. False ending after false ending after false ending after false ending. It fades to black while Sam and Frodo are on the rocks - it could have ended there. Fade back in, and an Eagle comes to save them - it should have ended there. Fade in again, and Frodo's recovering in bed, and all is well - I could have lived with it ending then. After that point, there's another 40 minutes of teary-eyes, royal processionals, consolation gifts from the elves, Frodo and Sam sharing secret smiles, long heartfelt goodbye hugs for all the Nazgul, Palpatine's statue being torn down on Coruscant, etc. It just never ends.
  It's hard for me to swallow "we didn't have time for The Scouring Of The Shire" when I'm waiting for an hour of epilogue to finish before I can go to the bathroom. I mean, come on, cut the sappy "we're going to miss these movies" crap and let me watch returning Hobbit adventurers kickin' the asses of Wormy and the Sackville Baginses. That would have been worth the kidney stones to sit through.
  Other than that last hour, though, the first 2.7 films of the trilogy were amazing and flawless, and you, my friend, are a heathen for insinuating otherwise.
  

You happy now? :) Sorry I wasted your time.

Suicide Soldiers (Updated)

US Combat Deaths in Iraq War since it's inception: just over 4,000
US Combat Deaths in Afghanistan since 2001: just over 600

Those numbers I already knew. A volunteer for the ACLU, working on a street corner I happened to walk past today, alerted me to a related set of facts I'd been unaware of.

# of attempted suicides amongst active duty US soldiers in 2002: 350
# of attempted suicides amongst active duty US soldiers in 2007: 2,100

The vast majority of those suicides have been amongst units that are NOT seeing combat, mostly on bases within the US. The suicide rate amongst servicemen is the highest it's been since the Vietnam War.
Worse yet, she said the same thing is happening amongst the National Guard units that were deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Worst of all, she said, despite all the combat, more US soldiers had killed themselves this year than had died in Afghanistan.

What the fuck is going on? These figures seemed so crazy, I couldn't just take her word for it. I told her as much, I was openly skeptical.

She said she was quite confident in those figures, as she herself had been out of the army for less than a year, having been discharged for medical reasons just a few months ago. She said this is the most important election in US History, and that her experiences in the military convinced her to take an active role in the ACLU to help ensure the integrity of the vote this year. She said, if you doubt my numbers, google it yourself when you get home.

So I did. OMG WTF I feel sick! She was right. Combat deaths right now are less than 10% of what they were in Vietnam, but the suicide rate for soldiers is about the same as it was then? Remember, in 'Nam, people were drafted - our current Army is all-volunteer, yet this year is expected to set a record-high for both attempts and successful suicides among servicemen. That is a terrifying sign that something really abnormal is transpiring on bases in the US.

I now have to repeat my earlier question: "What the fuck is going on?"

Addendum/Update:

• According to the articles, the vast majority of the suicides are folks who either have never seen combat duty, or have returned to from deployment more than a year ago. Nearly all the suicides are occuring on US bases.
• According to the lady I was talking to yesterday, there's one base in particular that's had more suicides in the past 7 years than soldiers died in Afgahnistan. I haven't been able to find an online source that confirms that later point, but I also can't remember the name of the base she'd indicated, which would probably make the search much easier. If this is true, that's a sure sign that something fucked up is happening on that base.
  

Like they do on the Discovery Channel

I only have a few months of satellite left so I've been watching a lot of the Discovery Channel. And by "a lot" I mean once or twice a week. Last night it was "Caves", which is pretty freaky for a claustrophobic like myself. I've been far more comfortable dangling from a catwalk eighty feet above the ground, than crawling though tunnels, but that's another story. The important part here is that they start off the show with a scene of base jumpers at the Cave of Swallows which also appears in the Discovery Channel's promo "I Love the World":



Anyway, I had gone looking for the video on YouTube, and the first hit was The Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch":



Since then it's been stuck in my head. Okay, so there's really no point to this post...

Old Glory vs Robots

The dangers of medicine-eating robots, brought to my attention via Seth's Blog:

Warning: Persons denying the existence of robots may be robots themselves.

Looking Past The Glowing Spines

I'm trying very hard to give the current Battlestar Galactica a second try. Last time, I only made it to the end of season 1, despite really wanting to love the series. But, late one night a few months back, whilst battling insomnia, I caught half of an awesome class-struggles episode from what I believe is Season 4. It keeps wandering into my mind when we blog about the vanishing middle class, and the manipulative tricks of politicians, so I eventually decided I needed to put it all on netflix and try again.

There's a lot of genius in that show, but it all gets so badly muddied by the production errors and a few logic holes.

(To see spoilers, highlight all the text, and/or copy and pace into a word processor and turn the text black)

Octagonal paper. It doesn't make a ton of sense in-character, since it would be wasteful cutting off those corners or inefficient making octagonal sheets individually. But, even if you suspend your disbelief of that and assume there's some cultural reasoning to justify the extra expense, you then find that they don't apply it consistently. Traditional square-cornered books appear on Caprica. Apollo's notebook at the sabotage inquiry is just a normal rectangular notebook. The president's whiteboard, critical to the visual thematics of one of the best episodes, has rounded corners.

Water Numbers. They claim the Galactica has a year's supply of water. Then they say they lost 60% of the water reserve. Then, in the same scene, they claim to have less than a weeks supply left. 1 year minus 60% does not equal 1 week. It's hard to conceive of how the writer, director, editor, and the actor who delivers the line all could miss that. That's a continuity error worthy of a Pizza Face Death or Camera Man film.

Glowing spines. This was what broke it for me the first time. When it showed up in the early scene this time through, I just repeated to myself "Her spine is not really glowing. It's just a suboptimal lighting decision, not an intentional special effect intended to have meaning or relevance." It's gonna be tough, though. Sometime on the next disk is the sex scene in the woods (pictured left), which made me give up on the show the first time. If you're a trained soldier, and you've been spending weeks in the woods, running for your life from the red lights of cylon centurions, then unexplained red lights emitting from the back of your lover (and reflecting visibly off of several wet tree trunks around you) should kill your erection. It'd be one thing if sex with a Cylon rarely happened - I can suspend my disbelief on one or two occassions, and just assume the orgasm was so good, or the guy had his eyes closed, so he didn't notice. But there's plenty of implication that Baltar and the Crew Chief both shagged Cylons again and again without ever catching on. How pathetic is their sexlife that they never tried any other positions? Guess they just know what they like.

Indistiguishable Cylons. I do understand that the cylon detector program is stalled, sabotaged, and just generally mismanaged. Just the same, it's hard to swallow that "Cylons can't be distinguished by humans" when we know that:
1)Burnt Cylon "flesh" reveals trace synthetic elements
2)The government new for several decades that the radiation of the Ragnar Anchorage kept it safe from the Cylons since it was poisonous to them (and not to humans)
3)Their freakin' spines glow when they have an orgasm! That's gotta be genetically or neurologically different than human!
4)There's only 12 models of Cylon. Sooner or later, someone's going to say "Hey, you look and sound exactly like that guy I knew back on Picon!"

Given those facts, I sincerely hope that at some point (relatively early in the overall plotarc) they have somebody finally call Baltar out on his ridiculous inability to build a functioning Cylon detector. It's painful to see someone as bright as Adama or Madame President falling for his lies. That season 3 or 4 episode I saw had one scene of Baltar in a prison cell - man I'm lookin' forward to that.

I think I can (suspend my disbelief). I think I can. I think I can.

Impeach For Torture

This was in my inbox. It's about fuckin' time for them to agree with me.

Impeach Bush and Cheney for Torture

On Friday, George Bush told ABC News he personally approved of the approval of torture - including waterboarding - by Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet.

"Yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

In the wake of this shocking and appalling confession, we've come to a historic moment where every American - and every Member of Congress - must take a stand.

Either you're for torture or you're against it. And if you're against it, you must support the only Constitutional remedy for a President and Vice President who commit war crimes: impeachment.

Tell Congress to Impeach Bush and Cheney for Torture
http://www.democrats.com/impeach-for-torture

Dr. Martin Luther King famously said of the Vietnam War, "A time comes when silence is betrayal."

You're not The Master of me

WARNING: Spoilers. If you haven't seen all of Season 3 of Dr. Who, stop reading.

Picking up from where I left off last post: last night we watched Utopia, an episode of the new Dr. Who that ended with The Master. The phone rang, and while Sarah answered it, I ran to the computer and started blogging. It was going to be a lengthy post about how happy I was, for I had squealed repeatedly during the scenes immediately leading to his big reveal. But the phone call ended up being short, and there was no way we'd not be watching those last two episodes right that moment. The interruption saved me from gushing in ways I'd soon regret.

Suffice it to say, I was a bit disappointed with this incarnation of The Master. He wasn't sinister or fierce, he was just slapstick. He wasn't suave or manipulative, he just had a machine. His insanity was visible from the surface, not churning deep inside and threatening to boil over at any moment. I guess they went too far in trying to make him a reflection of the current (and most recent previous) Doctor.

What I thought would be cool about bringing The Master back would be the subtlety of character interactions, and the possibility to end a Season with an all-too-human duel of wits, as opposed to yet another army of millions of cyborgs. I'd dared to dream that perhaps "Blink" was set-up to accommodate our brains to the way only timelords can battle. The revelation of Saxon as Master at the beginning of Sound of the Drums seemed to confirm that.

Instead, we got over-acting from a cartoon villain and his army of billions of cyborgs. The struggle was totally level, not a genuine time combat. The Master seemed a parody of himself. (Thankfully the injector gun, and the implications that the little torture droids were new-model Daleks, both proved to be red herrings.) The episodes were still good, but not nearly what I'd built them up to be. All in all, several missed opportunities on the part of the writers.

---

Oh well, at least I still have to be in awe of what a great job they do with foreshadowing. I love how clues to the big bad are scattered through each season, but it's never quite enough to really figure out what's going to happen. In that regards, their arc structure is terribly formulaic, yet it's beat me 3 times out of 3. Even going into the 3rd Season with my eyes open and looking for the clues, I didn't get it. I knew Saxon was evil from the second time they mentioned him (must have been episode 3 or 4 of the season), but I didn't honestly think The Master was actually on screen until about a minute before he produced the pocketwatch.

As much as I loved Buffy, I must say the Dr. Who method is superior to having 15 out of 22 episodes (per season) feature the same villain. Of course, what made Buffy so fresh was it's innovation. This "surprise! we foreshadowed it!" method will also grow stale if too many shows start emulating it.

Zubaydah has Multiple Personalities

Here's some more data on the duplicity of those in charge. This is quoted from the Times of London, in regards to the Zubaydah interrogation tape.

recorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture - information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.

Even if you don't believe there's a conspiracy in power in Washington right now, you have to think it's kinda weird that we base our intelligence strategy off things said under duress by a man with Dissociative (Multiple Personality) Disorder?

Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11.

Evidence of the flawed nature of this "intelligence" is so damning that they destroyed the tape instead of surrendering it to the 9/11 commission.

We know about the destruction because someone in the government told The New York Times. We also know the 9/11 Commission had asked the administration to furnish every piece of relevant evidence with respect to Zubaydah’s interrogation and was not told about the tapes. We know also that four senior aides to Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, discussed the destruction of the tapes - including David Addington, Cheney’s right-hand man and the chief legal architect of the administration’s detention and interrogation policies.

As I predicted a while back, this leads straight to the white house.

The future is now

My apologies for the double-post to anyone who actually reads all my blogs, but this was just too cool to limit to one place.

40k Space Marines
Heinlein's Starship Troopers (but not the ones from the movie)
Cyberpunkers who need to go toe-to-toe with a full borg.

What do they have in common? Power Armor


Tip of the hat to Kevin for sending this video my way.