Tuesday, January 31, 2006
...I Chose the One Less Traveled By...
I know it's been a while since I posted. Okay, okay. My bad. I've been busy. Buy today I just could not hold back:So Anti-War Activist/Puppet Cindy Sheehan was arrested tonight inside the Capitol building. She was invited by Democrat Representative Lynn Woolsey to Bush's State of the Union Address tonight. And she was given terms... She could come, no problem, but she was not to be allowed to protest once inside the building. She protested outside, with a small group of others, chanting "You're evicted Get out of our house!" One of the many things I find funny about all of this is the fact that no cameras bothered to capture this "gripping" protest. Tossed aside as the useless puppet now that the public no longer cares... but wait... What does she do? Sheehan gets inside the building and takes off her jacket to reveal a shirt reading "2,245 Dead - How Many More??", a direct reference to US losses in the War in Iraq.
She was promptly arrested for this and escorted from the building. Why? Simple. Her shirt was a protest. She was instructed she could not protest inside the building. She was asked by Bush's security to respect him and his address and she, the "victim" who never plays by the rules once again jumped into the spotlight as Bambi, the willing sacrafice before the altar of public conscience. Please. She's not a "victim." She won't leave George Bush alone. She follows him everywhere, disrupting and disrespecting him. Any other case like this and I think we'd all use a different word... Stalker. Yeah, that's right. I just called Cindy Sheehan George W. Bush's stalker. Why do we put up with this crap? We all get behind the big movie stars and musicians who complain about whackos who just won't let them live. Why do the liberals and their media whores think we won't think this is any different.
Personally, I for one think that Bush's people have been right in arresting Sheehan twice now. She deserves it. She is a stalker. She is a menace. She is nothing special. It's not good enough that Bush met with her once. No, no. She requests, no - demands, he meet with her a second time. Does she not realize some of the richest and most powerful men on the earth will never see him, or perhaps only see him once? And she, who by having a slain son alone does not warrant any special treatment beyond a nod and a boquet has the nerve to tell the American public that she is entitled to see Bush again. Whatever lady. Bush is the president. And as the line from Battlestar Galactica said last week, "Sometimes the thing about being President is that you don't have to explain yourself."
Cindy Sheehan is a menace. End of story. And I for one, will cheer each and every time her ass lands behind bars... where stalkers belong in the first place.
posted by Christian at |10:50| pm
Thursday, December 1, 2005
You Don't Need Deck the Halls or Jingle Bell Rock...
And now, because I'm too lazy to convert write something today, I give you an announcement from the Libertarian Party of Texas. Here you go.posted by Christian at |1:21| am
Friday, November 11, 2005
Prop 2
Something I have been mulling over the last few days is the passing of Proposition 2 here in Texas this week. Basically, this permanently sealed the lid on gay marriage in this state. Voters turned out in a landslide to pass the Proposition, which banned marriage between Homosexuals. This doesn't surpise me, I live in perhaps the most Conservative state in the entire Union (and God, how I love that!!). But it does disappoint me.There is a difference between personal morality and social morality. The difference being, in my book, that most things of a moral nature are personal. It can and should only be up to you. You may not eat Pork. I love it. Others don't eat meat. Some recycle. Some drive SUV's. Some date members of their sex and others go the traditional way. Yes, that's right. I consider that choice to be no more important and any more my business than my vegitarian neighbor's love for tofu. You see, I on a personal level, as a Christian I believe that the gay lifestyle and gay marriage are not God's will and are sinful. I would rather they just didn't, you know? But see, that's my opinion. And opinions are like arm pits... everyone has them and everyone else's stinks.
But seriously, personal morality is basically where the action or belief at hand only has an impact on a personal level. Whether or not Tom and Bob wants to tie the knot doesn't actually have any effect on me. It's their lives and when you really start reading the consitution and understanding the letters of this land, you'd realize that personal morality is left up to each individual in their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
Social morality are things that effect us all. Murder, rape, abortion, theft, these are all examples of things that are or should be expressly forbidden because they are anti-constitutional. Things of this nature are anti-constitutional because they break the general spirit of the document, which is basically "You go your way, I will go mine. We are both completely free in our actions and decisions so long as we do not harm one another."
Now tell me, how is Lucy and Peg marrying each other unconstitutional? How is it socially wrong? Gays, whether you believe they are living in sin or not, are still people. More than that, they are Americans. And as Americans they are entitled to each and every privilige you and I straight, white, Christian Americans are afforded. In the spirit of the constitution, regardless of personal convictions, there is no possible way that Homosexual union as recognized by State and Federal governments should be considered illegal. It is a spit in the face of the Constitution and our nation's founding prinicples to deny another American his freedom in personal choice. Come on America, this is a personal issue not a social one. Like it or not, Gays deserve the right to marry. That, my friend, is Constitutional to the core.
posted by Christian at |11:34| am
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Now Showing
Check it outposted by Christian at |12:55| am
Friday, October 28, 2005
Friends Come In All Sizes
First read this. You will find my commentary below.Well, speaking as a Starbucks Barista of many years, I am thrilled to see both the Maupin cup and the Warren cup. We at Starbucks embrace and celebrate diversity. That's the beauty of Starbucks. It's purpose, when you really listen to Howard Schultz is to bring us all together and get us talking. Gay, Straight, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Athiest, Pornographer, Tax Collector, Evangelical, New York Liberal, we are all people. We all have our stories. We all have our way of seeing things. These cups are not about changing the way others see things, it's about sharing our own personal view. To show the world how things are through our eyes. I enjoy learning of others persepectives. These cups embrace diversity and I for one stand up and cheer "Bravo!" for all of them.
Embracing diversity is one of Starbucks Six Guiding Principles. I as a Barista proudly do it every day, it may be serving thought provoking quotes on cups, it may be sitting down with the Hindu jewelry kiosk owner from down the shopping center and conversing about his day, it may be even as simple as showing up and embracing a working relationship with my homosexual manager. My point is we are all different. Starbucks has always known this and celebrated this. These cups are a great way to get us to talk about our differences. Next time you glance down at your Quad Grande Americano read what someone else has to say. Digest it. Discuss it with the person next to you. The idea is to get you talking. So get out there and do it...
posted by Christian at |10:15| am
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
To The Black
Joss Whedon, the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, has a knack for creating TV shows with cult followings, and his sci-fi western Firefly was no exception. The show, which followed an eclectic band of outlaws aboard the 26th century smuggling ship Serenity, was cancelled by Fox in 2002 after only 11 of 14 episodes produced had aired, but an intense core of fans - and bootlegged episodes circulating on peer-to-peer networks - continued to spread Firefly's evangel. When the series was released on DVD, it became a surprise hit: big enough to convince Universal to back a feature film follow-up, Serenity, which opened last weekend. (Saw it first showing... It was Gorram Shiny!)The interesting thing about Firefly's cult following, though, is that it seems to include a disproportionate number of libertarians. At an advance screening in Washington, D.C., the head of Bureaucrash, a couple of folks from the Cato Institute, and at least a half-dozen from the Institute for Humane Studies were reportedly spotted. ::hmm::
It's not hard to see why. The entrepreneurial Captain Mal Reynolds and First Mate Zoe Washburn - who's married to pilot Wash - are Browncoats, veterans of a failed war of independence against The Alliance, the series' main antagonists. Ship medic Simon Tam is a fugitive who abandoned a lucrative medical career on the core planets to break his brilliant teenaged sister River out of an Alliance facility where her high-octane brain was being folded, spindled, and mutilated for mysterious purposes. There's sexual tension so thick it might drip on you between Mal and Inara Serra , a "registered companion," which is Firefly-speak for a high-class (and high-status) licensed prostitute. And Second Amendment buffs have a kindred spirit in mercenary muscleman Jayne Cobb. As Whedon himself puts it,
"Mal is, if not a Republican, certainly a libertarian; he's certainly a less-government kinda guy. He's the opposite of me in many ways."
For those who think a bit more like Mal, there's plenty of red meat in Serenity from the very outset. The backstory is quickly provided by a scene at an Alliance school, where a teacher sadly muses that it's hard to understand why the benighted Independents, the secessionists , have resisted the attempt to bring them the gifts of civilization. A young, pre-brain tampering River Tam knows:
"We meddle... People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads, and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome."
And, as it turns out, they are. The action of the early second act is driven by the Serenity crew's attempt to discover what, exactly has been done to River - and decide whether the Alliance's fiddling has rendered her too dangerous to have aboard - while evading the agent sent to track her down, a man known only as The Operative.
Matters are complicated when the crew discover why the Alliance is so eager to retrieve their experiment: She has information about a horribly failed plan to develop a soma-like air additive called "pax," meant to render populations docile. It works too well: Millions of people in a test population on a hidden planet simply gave up on living. As a handy expository hologram-recording by one of the scientists involved tearfully explains, "We meant it for the best, to make people safer." And in a slight - but crucial - departure from the series, it is made clear that this is not merely the work of "the Alliance" as such, but of the Parliament: A democracy did this. Mal and company resolve to expose the experiment, convinced that despite the tragic results, eventually "They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people better. And I don't hold to that."
The most important source of ideas in Serenity, though, is not a kind of vague libertarianism, but existentialism. As Whedon explains in director's commentary for the Firefly episode "Objects in Space," he was influenced at a young age by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea, the themes of which permeate that episode.
Whedon has a gift for integrating existentialist ideas seamlessly into his scripts. One of Sartre's central ideas, for example, is that of "bad faith," the attempt to deny our own agency and responsibility. Among his classic illustrations is that of the cafe waiter who wishes to vanish into his role, not merely be a person who happens to work at a restaurant, but to become "a waiter." And in "Objects in Space," that idea is concisely inserted in an exchange between River and the ruthless but oddly philosophical bounty hunter Jubal Early:
River: You hurt people.
Early: Only when the job requires it.
River: Wrong. You're a bad liar... You like to hurt folk.
Early: It's part of the job.
River: It's why you took the job.
In Serenity, however, the central influence appears to be not Sartre but Albert Camus. The Operative, for example, is emphatically not some mere bounty hunter, but a true believer. As he explains at one point, "I believe in something greater than myself: A better world, a world without sin." He has no illusions, either, about the morally monstrous acts he must perpetuate in service of that end, acts he recognizes make him unfit to live in his own utopia. The Operative is a Moses who knows he will not reach the promised land he hopes to fashion. He is, in other words, a perfect instance of the revolutionary mindset Camus describes in The Rebel, an anti-Marxist essay that was the catalyst for Camus' break with the (then) pro-Soviet Sartre. For the revolutionary, Camus notes, values are "only to be found at the end of history. Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgement of value. One must act and live in terms of the future. All morality becomes provisional."
Camus, though, distinguishes between the revolutionary, who dreams of imposing a totalizing new world order, and the rebel, who has the narrower goal of defending his own dignity in the face of oppression. Mal, it's made clear, is the latter: When The Operative tells him that he can't hope to beat The Alliance, Mal responds, "I got no need to beat you; just want to go on my way." For Camus' rebel, though, that recognition that there is something in oneself worth fighting for, a taste for freedom worth defending, metastasizes into a realization that everyone shares the same dignity and rights - even, perhaps, the oppressor. That move from the personal to the political gives the cynical Mal a renewed sense of purpose, something to believe in - which is another of Serenity's central themes, that perhapssome things are worth fighting for after all.
The idea at the core of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus is what the author calls "the absurd": Human beings are driven to seek greater meaning and purpose in a universe where, for the good and wicked alike, all roads lead to the grave. And Whedon has a powerful absurdist sensibility. As the film's third act begins, just as the crew has apparently escaped a tough situation, a major character delivers a comic line and, just as the audience is beginning to laugh, is abruptly, brutally, pointlessly killed. And it's not how we're used to. It is not a noble sacrifice, not a defeat in battle; there are no stirring, poignant last words. Like so many actual deaths, though very few dramatic ones, it is utterly unexpected and serves no purpose - beyond, perhaps unsettling the Whedon-novice's complacent assumption that main characters can't be killed off arbitrarily. The laugh line is, appropriately enough, "I am a leaf on the wind." (It's funny in context.) A leaf on the wind indeed.
In the face of an absurd universe - one lacking transcendent, factory-installed meanings - we are compelled to create our own. After explaining that The Operative is dangerous precisely because he is a "believer," ship's preacher Shepherd Book tells Mal "I don't care what you believe. Just believe," echoing the proto-existentialist theologian Soren Kierkegaard, who stressed the centrality of passionate commitment, "leaps of faith," in religion.
The Alliance's horrific attempt to "make people safer," provides more than a cartoonish portrait of out-of-control government, rampant socialism to be exact. For, as we learn, it is not merely that the "pax" gas proves lethal: It kills by making those who breathe it indifferent to life. The residents of the experimental planet simply stopped caring about everything, stopped bothering to get out of bed, to work, to eat. They become, in other words, much like extreme versions of the affectless Meursault in Camus' The Stranger.
Of course, you don't have to have read Camus, or even be fond of berets or clove cigarettes, to be a fan of Serenity. The film's genius is that it works on so many levels - political, philosophical, and, most importantly, narrative. If you show up in theaters just looking for a tightly plotted, smartly scripted sci-fi action flick, you'll come away happy. For the attentive viewer, though, Serenity is not just a string of good chase scenes, but an "absurd reasoning," a surprisingly profound meditation on what freedom truly means.
posted by Christian at |11:30| pm
Things I've Learned Watching Pinko Commie Liberal News Over the Last Few Days
1.Katrina only hit the properties of black families.2.New Orleans was devastated, but no other city or town was affected by the hurricane.
3.Mississippi is reported to have a tree blown down.
4.New Orleans has no white people.
5.The hurricane blew a limb off a tree in the yard of an Alabama resident.
6.When you are hungry after a hurricane, steal a big-screen TV.
7.The hurricane did $23 billion in improvements to New Orleans, because the city is now welfare-, looter- and gang-free...and they are now in your home town.
8.White folks don't make good news stories.
9.Don't give thanks to the thousands who came to help rescue you. Instead, bitch because the government hasn't yet given you a debit card.
10.Only black family members got separated during the hurricane rescue efforts.
11.Ignore warnings to evacuate, because the white folks will come get you and give you money for being stupid.
posted by Christian at |11:50| pm
