Cultivating marijuana on the cheap? Take a tip: DON'T click here!

You just know the site admins will be scanning the IP logs for whoever buys a bunch of grow lights (probably the most common item up for sale) from Property Room Police Auctions Online. Run by an outfit called Property Bureau, it's a pretty clever idea: giving police auctions (a longstanding procedure for disposing of seized property and stolen goods that could not be returned to the rightful owners) a wider "customer base" than their reach normally allows by selling larcened and licentious loot on the Internet (they should have named it "pdBay" :-P). Going by the info posted on the site, it looks like helping police and sheriff departments clean out their property rooms this way plays an adjunct role to Property Bureau's other purpose: being an online database of the goods with the items' serial numbers and any other pertinent information, thus letting owners of stolen property easily search and potentially recover it. Yeah, it's all real clever... but somehow I don't think titling an auction as "Look Here NintendoDS - HOT ITEM!" is going to really differentiate it from other auctions by very much ;-) Anyways, I just found the site a little while ago and it's loads of fun looking at the kinds of gadgets that today's crooks are both stealing and using. Check it out!

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For the record: I NEVER said that I wanted to kill Pat Robertson

A few days ago I posted "Haul Pat Robertson's butt out of Virginia Beach... AND STONE HIM TO DEATH!!". It was in response to Robertson's annual penchant for claiming that God was speaking through him about the coming year. And it elicited some ... interesting... feedback.

Some got it and some didn't. A few were downright horrified. One guy wrote me that initially he thought I was a few cards short of a full deck to have the gall to publish something like that. But after reading the entire thing he said "that's was an f'ing work of genius!"

If all you saw was the headline - either here or elsewhere on the 'net where this was referenced - I strongly urge you to read it. ALL of it. And think about the REAL point that I was making with this. I do not want to see Pat Robertson stoned to death: unlike some Christians, I do strive to believe that every man (and woman) can grow and change and become more Christ-like so long as there's breath in his lungs. Having weaknesses of character - including such glaring weaknesses as Robertson illustrates - are no grounds for wanting to see someone dead. Neither are such things as differences of political or spiritual belief. And if you've taken the time to read the entire essay, you will realize fully well that I never did anything other than try to lead people to think about what it is we have to be... if we really want to wear the label "Christian" before the world.

Now, Pat Robertson and countless like him advocate the death and destruction of those not like them every day of their lives. And they are gosh-darned serious about wanting to see them dead. And nobody takes them to task on it: more often than not it's met with little more than a shrug, as if to acknowledge that "that's just the way things are."

Well, I refuse to accept the cruelties of this world as "just the way things are" without doing something about it.

My essay merely reflected back toward them the evil that Pat Robertson and those like him relish committing in the name of God. And if some people didn't like that, well, it's as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg put it:

"A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out."

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YES YES YES YES YES!!! "The Tripods" will tower on the big screen soon!

This generation of kids needs a movie like Red Dawn: you know that flick twenty-odd years ago where Patrick Swayze and his high-school chums waged guerilla warfare on the Soviet swine that had taken over their Colorado hometown and the rest of America. It's so dated now as to be laughable (though for awhile it held the Guinness record for being "most violent movie ever") but the core idea is the same: young people fighting for real freedom, instead of sitting around in their Birkenstocks signing pointless petitions and otherwise complaining against "evil white men" or whatever. Director John Milius had a clear notion in mind that America was a great land because her children could fast learn their way around an AK-47... and ya know, he's right. But that ain't the point of this post.

Lots of places have the news but I found it first on ComingSoon.net that John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy is being adapted into a feature-length film series: presumably one film for each book (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire). Haven't heard anything on whether the prequel novel When the Tripods Came is part of the deal but that alone would be hella lotta fun to see as a two-hour movie.

Now if Disney (which'll be producing and distributing it) does it right, this will potentially be a very cool thing to behold: right up there with Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix saga. I don't wanna spoil any of the really good details but this'll give you an inkling: it's an unspecified time (centuries from now?) in Earth's future and everything's gone back to medieval days. You can live free as a bird and do whatever you want... until your fourteenth birthday. At which time the Tripod comes to your village and grabs you with a tentacle and draws you into itself. That's when you get "capped". And after that you never need to fear having to think for yourself again for the rest of your life. Everyone in one village of the land once called England accepts this ritual without question. Everyone, except for one boy approaching his fourteenth birthday. And then one day a "vagrant" comes to the village...

I mentioned Red Dawn earlier 'cuz that's what this book series always reminds me of: it's like Red Dawn meets Independence Day crossed with Stand By Me. And for a book series aimed at young teens there's an awful lot of core values that the saga emphasizes: I'd even say the trilogy is "traditional conservative science-fiction". There's a box set of all four books at Amazon and since it's long been considered a classic book for young people you should have no trouble finding it in the preteen's fiction section of your bookstore.

Can't wait to see the movie. I'm praying that it'll do justice to the books. In the meantime, if any suggestions can be made I can't think of anyone better to play the role of Julius than either Sean Connery or Ian McKellan.

(And if you REALLY want a treat in the meantime, hunt out the comic-style serial that Boys Life magazine did of the trilogy back in the early 1980s: a terrific adaptation that deserves getting republished for mass consumption!)

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UPDATED: Blog now viewable with IE! Was: Technical difficulties, please stand by (or make the switch to Mozilla!)

UPDATE 01:27 AM EST 01-07-2004: Worked from 4-something yesterday afternoon 'til a little after midnight. The problem apparently lay in some things that weren't XHTML 1.0 Strict. Most of the work was just turning upper-cased tags (an old habit) into lower-case for XHTML and cleaning up probably two minor gaffes in the code. However it happened, this blog is now perfectly readable in Microsoft Internet Explorer so ummmm... enjoy! :-)

Original Post:
If you're visiting this blog from a Mozilla or Firefox browser, you probably don't notice anything. If you're using Internet Explorer, you will be straining your eyes to read some impossibly large fonts right now.

I finally started overhauling the look of this blog and something, somewhere, in the CSS went a little funny in the head. I'm still very much old-school HTMLer (can type it out in Notepad much faster than if I were to use Dreamweaver or some other web editor) and CSS is something I haven't been working with for very long. But it looks like it might be a messy conflict involving IE and Movable Type (which my blog doesn't have... don't think so anyway) and how the template should be coded to accommodate it.

So right now "Weird" Ed and I are going over the template to try and find what's wrong. We should have it fixed before too late this evening. In the meantime if you still want to enjoy the site and have been using IE, now's as good a time as any to Mozilla or Firefox. They're faster, more reliable and have the benefit of being open-source so you can go through it and make sure the browser ain't doing something it should be doing.

And if you are using a Mozilla or some other browser, hope you enjoy the new look of the place :-) Tried to make it mirror my personality a bit. Got a few more things to add in but the CSS problem comes first.

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Horatio Bunce's smackdown on President Bush: "Where do you find any authority...?"

Somebody please explain to me how it is that a millionaire tycoon can give away $20 million of the people's hard-earned money to a terrorist front, can raid the public treasury for $200 billion to spend on wars with no defined goals or even strategy, and who is now now appropriating $350 million - also from public funds - toward recovery efforts from the Southeast Asian tsunami can have no qualms about spending other people's money like a drunken sailor... but only finds enough charity in his own heart to write tsunami victims a check for the paltry sum of $10,000.

What President Bush does with his own money is of no concern to me: if he wanted to write a check for five bucks, he's got a right to do that. But when it comes to our money and my own "contribution" (read as: pay taxes smile and ignore the big gun we've aimed at your head)... well, that does concern me. It should concern everyone. That money that Bush is giving away so freely - regardless of good intention - isn't his money to give away at all!

I could say more, but it was already said long ago and with far more eloquence than I can muster on the subject. You'll have to do a Google search for Horatio Bunce and how he figures into American history, but here's his sage wisdom that slaps just about every politician in Washington hard in the face...

"...Where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity? ...There are plenty of wealthy men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life. The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution."

Bunce did persuade at least one American politician with his take on things... but like I said, you're going to have to do a search on it yourself. You'll thank me later for the extra work 'cuz you'll come to appreciate it all the more :-)

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This is why American efforts in Iraq will fail

From the Associated Press via Yahoo!...

25 Killed in Car-Bomb Attacks in Iraq

Wed Jan 5, 4:12 PM ET

By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide attacker blew up an explosives-laden car outside a police academy south of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 20 people, and another car bomb left five Iraqi policemen dead. Despite the surge of violence aimed at derailing this month's elections, Iraq (news - web sites)'s interim leader again insisted the ballot would go ahead as planned.

"We will not allow the terrorists to stop the political process in Iraq," Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said as the death toll from insurgent attacks topped 90 over four days this week. "The elections process is the basis for the deepening of the national unity in Iraq."

We should pull out all our troops. Now. We should never have gone into Iraq. Ever.

You cannot "give" a people their democracy. And the authority for self-rule was never ours to grant anybody, at all. That authority can only come from the Establisher of ALL authority: namely, God. And if we haven't learned how to manage our own authority that He gave to us, how dare we tell another nation how to manage its own... much less be so haughty as to believe that we can give it to them of our own sense of ego.

If the people of Iraq desired enough that they be rid of Saddam Hussein, then they should have risen up against him. On their own. And they could have done so, if they had mustered the will and the drive and the courage to overcome Saddam and his minions. But apart from some pockets of resistance they were too timid to reach out and grasp that freedom on their own.

We are making a terrible, terrible mistake in Iraq, now almost two years into this venture and at the cost of 1300-some American lives. And no amount of spin or platitude from this government can deny this fact: those young men and women who sprang from our own soil died for nothing. Nothing at all. They perished for something absent of any sense or rationale except for the empty rhetoric that "it's for our country" or "we're keeping our families free"... when freedom here vanishes with each new day.

How then can we expect to give freedom to a people who have never even known it to begin with?

Freedom must be earned. It can never be bestowed. At least by any man.

And that lack of humility is why we fail in Iraq, and will always fail.

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AMC right now is showing Dune: the finest homo-erotic glorious heap of a sci-fi epic that 1984 had to offer!

Alfred Hitchcock once said that Smokey and the Bandit was his "favorite guilty pleasure" of a movie. And that's pretty much what David Lynch's adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel Dune is for me.

The short version (the one that Lynch allowed his name on, and not the "Alan Smithee" extra-long version that has much more cool stuff in) is on AMC right now and I swear they've messed with it more... as if it wasn't messed-up enough already. For one thing at the beginning of this one I noticed that the Guild Navigator's voice was different, somehow. It didn't sound as menacing as I remember it. Come to think of it, it was different: it's definitely not the same voice as is the Navigator's in the longer version (which was the same voice as the short version). Maybe AMC decided to make it sound clearer to the audience or something.

Geez, I've always been conflicted about this movie. I read the novel Dune in September 1990, when I was a junior in high school and... yeah, it was definitely one of the book that most changed my life. So much metaphor in it about religion, and economics and addiction and the costs that come with "playing it safe". The stagnation of cultures and how it is more often than not countered by the outbreak of crusades (or jihads)... Dune the novel was the *perfect* nutshell education about the pattern of history. And when David Lynch got his hands on the film rights he almost pulled off a perfect adaptation.

EXCEPT for all the unnecessary bizarro crap that he just couldn't resist "being David Lynch" about and had to throw in. I mean, "weirding modules"...?!? Where da heck did THAT crap come from?! The Navigators need the prescience they gain from the spice to guide the ships through space and that's from the novel but when it comes to guiding those ships with their anuses ummmm... no. I don't wanna touch what Lynch did with the Harkonnens but since we're on the subject: what was the man thinking?! Sure they were a decadent lot in the novel, but not this bad: that scene where Baron Harkonnen pulls the "heart plug" on the nubile young boy slave with the flowers that he kisses and molests as the kid is bleeding from his aorta and dying as the life seeps from his eyes (oh yeah the naked kid is wearing a giant transparent Glad-Bag, parse that as you will) is just... wrong, dude.

The only time I've been this confused about an item of pop culture came a few years later when I listened to Richard Harris singing "MacArthur Park":

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

I say again: "whu honey?" Go back to teaching at Hogwarts, Dumbledore: this croon's shining moment only came when "Weird Al" Yankovic turned it into "Jurassic Park".

I spent months after reading the original novel trying to find Lynch's film version on video. It finally came on a local teevee station on Easter Sunday in 1991... on my 17th birthday as it happened. I watched a bit at home then went over to my grandmother's house for Easter dinner. She let me watch the rest of it there and when the Reverend Mother appeared with those messed-up teeth Granny asked me what I was watching and I told her "It's the movie version of Dune" she looked back at the screen then me and said "whatever it is, it looks weeeiiird." Was really sweet, seeing my 84-year old grandmother laugh at a crazy sci-fi movie like that. But then, she was one of the few members of my family that ever "got" my whole Star Wars craze, too. The day after the Episode I toys went on sale I had to watch the local news at her house, 'cuz I was first in line for the 12:01 AM opening at Toys R Us to get the new Star Wars toys. And I was trying to explain how "we would be the first to set our eyes on a virgin pile of unsoiled mounds of Star Wars merchandise." And then a few days later when I camped out for Episode I tickets. She never ceased thinking that it was really cute that her 25-year old grandson could still be this big a kid.

It was on my 17th birthday that we watched this messed-up flick together.

It was on my 26th birthday that we had her funeral. I was one of the pallbearers. It wasn't a very happy birthday.

Dear Lord... five years later and I still miss her.

Maybe that's what keeps drawing me to David Lynch's Dune: for all the visual assault that it is, to me it represents a very tender moment that I shared with my grandmother, who remains one of the sweetest and most influential people in my life and who I will always regret never lived long enough to meet the girl who became my wife. It was the kind of moment where a kid who's a little (or a lot) more different than most realized that he was not only loved unconditionally by someone, but that person loved him enough to make an effort to appreciate what made him tick. I sure wish I could tell you what made her tick... but I can't, except to say that she simply loved everyone, whether you were family or not, or white or black or even gay or lesbian, which a few wound up coming to visit her house more than once. EVERYONE was welcome to put their feet under her dinner table (and believe you me she wasn't going to let you leave until she was sure you'd stuffed yourself with all the homecooked food you could possibly want, no matter WHO you were). She loved you whether you believed in God or not: she knew He loved them despite that, so she'd better learn to love them too.

Sheesh, never thought I could have so many thoughts and feelings associated with a David Lynch movie.

Anyhoo, I know the Sci-Fi Channel remake a few years ago kept a lot more things faithful to the book, but Lynch almost accomplished a perfect adaptation here. You can tell that he was hitting on all the right cylinders so far as Herbert's themes went... if only he hadn't mucked it up in so much other crazy imagery. For whatever reason, I'll prolly never buy the DVD but I always have to catch this whenever it's on the tube.

BTW, the Dune novels themselves - the ones that Frank Herbert wrote - are a magnificent series and prolly the most epic and thought-provoking only after Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Yeah, I appreciate most of the other science-fiction classics. I even wound up using Isaac Asimov's Foundation years ago while doing practicum as a student teacher, as a way of introducing the themes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to high school students. I've been keen on some of the more obscure ones (speaking of which, Philip Jose' Farmer's Riverworld novels are science-fiction's greatest secret and whoever did the Sci-Fi Channel adaptation should be dragged out into the street and shot) and someday I'm praying that someone like Peter Jackson will do a big screen version of Harry Harrison's West of Eden. But other than Tolkien, no other sci-fi/fantasy writer molded my thoughts on things as a teenager than did Herbert. Be warned though: the first three books in the Dune series you can coast through. It's when you get to God Emperor of Dune that you REALLY have to swim against his unrelenting torrent of philosophy and theology. And by the time you get to the last one that he did, Chapterhouse: Dune... well, let's just say that I've heard from way too many people that that novel triggered WAY premature adolescence in a lot of guys. But if you get to the very last pages of the very last novel and you're in the know on things, you'll catch the very sweet homage that Herbert makes to his beloved wife Beverly (who had just passed away from cancer). And so far as that "too many unfinished threads" thing goes, a few years ago someone found some computer disks that had Frank Herbert's notes and outlines for an ending chapter to the entire saga, and according to the official Dune website Herbert's son Brian is using that to base two forthcoming novels - Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune - that should wrap everything up. Hope they're better than the recent "Butlerian Jihad" Dune novels he did with Kevin J. Anderson... those were BIGTIME disappointment in my book.

(Okay, I better finish now, before I start ranting about how Kevin J. Anderson messed up Star Wars back in the mid-Nineties. He did write my all-time favorite Star Wars novel though: Darksaber. But I'll scream about that later.)

One thing's for sure though: I never stopped being this kind of a geek. Or ever grew out of being a kid. Not really. Granny wouldn't have wanted me to stop being like this either. And that's not what my dear wife or my closest and dear friends have ever wanted: they like the fact that, at heart, I'm still a big kid. And if I still watch weirdfest movies like the original Dune, well... what's the harm in that, eh?

Because in the end, it's what keeps me young forever. And what keeps me looking out for the simple things in life... like love and truth.

(Oh yeah, AMC is showing Mad Max with Mel Gibson later tonight. Let's see if this is the "new" version that has the original undubbed Australian accents :-P)

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"Voices of North Carolina" premieres tomorrow night on NC Public TV.

Chad Austin over at Chad's Running Commentary sends word that PBS stations in North Carolina will be broadcasting the debut of a new documentary. Yah I know some people think that "PBS" means "Pretty Boring Stuff" but fact is they DO air some amazing things besides dragging Betty White and Kermit the Frog out every spring to shill for money. And if you happen to live in-state you really, oughtta, gottta watch this thing tomorrow night 'cuz we've received word that it might get a lot more crazy than PBS is mostly known for. In his post Chad writes that...

North Carolina may have the most diverse mixture of dialects of anywhere in the United States, according to NC State linguistics professor Walt Wolfram. I helped Dr. Wolfram get the word out on his new documentary, "Voices of North Carolina," which airs on North Carolina public television this Thursday at 10 p.m. Dr. Wolfram discussed his project and fielded listener calls today during an interview on WUNC radio. For those of you residing in the Tar Heel state, tune in Thursday night for an informative and entertaining look at the way we talk...

You can click on the link to Chad's blog for info on where to order VHS/DVD copies of the film and that might be wise if nothing else than to have as a collector's item 'cuz reliable sources have informed me that one of the "Voices of North Carolina" will be none other than Maggie Valley, North Carolina's very own legendary moonshiner/bootlegger/author of Me and My Likker/collector of curios/several other things that I've been sworn to silence on: Popcorn Sutton! I've never actually met the man himself but having spoken with a lot of people who do know him... well, let's just say that he's DEFINITELY a larger-than-life character whose reputation has far exceeded the bounds of not just his region or his state, but his country also. Should be a hoot to watch the guy in action come tomorrow night!

"Voices of North Carolina" airs Thursday, January 6th at 10 PM on North Carolina Public Television.

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Is it The Day After Tomorrow? Wild thing I've been wondering since the earthquake...

Little after 10 PM on an early January evening here in North Carolina. Average for this time of year for this part of the night is about 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit, and if we're getting buffeted by a winter storm that usually goes to between 5 and 20 and sometimes a lot lower.

According to the Weather Channel's website, right now it is 64 degrees. The projected low for the next ten days is predicted to be 39.

Now, we've had it be this warm before only to make up for it in spades. Twenty winters ago we had a Christmas and New Years in the seventies and mid-eighties... only to suffer through a massive snow and ice storm a few weeks later that dropped the mercury to minus-2. And that was the high for a couple of days! And this part of the state went four years or so with nary a snowflake in sight. Younger kids were wondering if older people were just making up stories about the white stuff and some of us were even forgetting what it really looked like. But as the saying goes "be careful what you wish for" 'cuz then came "the Storm of the Century" in 1993 and we didn't complain about snow for the next ten years or so.

So, weather here can be a little wonky. The thing is, it's really wonky all over the place right now: snow in Phoenix, warm rain in Michigan, unseasonably hot in places that should be freezing...

I'm just wondering: did last week's earthquake in Southeast Asia do something to Earth's climate? More to the point: could it have permanently altered the world's weather patterns?

Had a science teacher years ago who told us that there was evidence that the ice ages happened because of precession of the Earth's axis. The poles aren't quite stationary: they wobble like the axis of a spinning top that follows a circular path (here's a good site that explains it better). And the theory went that as the pole migrated a little further one way, it caused the hemispheres to either receive more or less direct sunlight than they normally got. So if precession caused the northern hemisphere to lose sunlight, it could have triggered a climate change that led to massive sheets of ice covering most of northern Europe and North America.

Scientists are now reporting that last week's earthquake shifted the North Pole by an inch or two. Doesn't sound like much. But when you consider Complexity Theory and the whole "butterfly effect" thing where a butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong and changes weather in New York City... well, how much more a headache would meteorologists get from an entire planet moving?

I've only a cursory knowledge of weather (sometimes wish that I'd studied it in college) so I don't know: I'm just a historian/writer/filmmaker/website designer. But it's something to consider. In light of my earlier post, thought I'd throw that theory out for public consumption.

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A "great Christian leader chosen by God"... and it ain't Bush either.

Someone sent me a link to an interesting article by Maureen Farrell titled "'God Is With Us': Hitler's Rhetoric and the Lure of 'Moral Values'". I know nothing about Maureen Farrell at all, but this is a pretty scary read in that she notes the uncanny parallels between the semantics of the Third Reich and what George W. Bush says (which his followers parrot). The gist of Farrell's piece is that anyone can say the right words and make the correct gestures and come across as a devout and God-honoring Christian. That... and also that people are foolish to blindly follow such a person without also examining his underlying character (you know: the things and beliefs that really define what a man is). The German people got hoodwinked by Hitler because of his rhetoric, and now many Americans are following suit behind another man and judging him by slick packaging, instead of taking the time to size him on their own.

I dunno about you, but I'd rather let my conscience before God and my understanding of scripture be my guide as to whether any man is worth considering as my leader. Why should I let Karl Rove be a substitute for that?

But anyhoo, after reading this and finding some photos on sites that Farrell linked to, they made me recollect a few things that I'd seen over the past couple of years. Since pictures speak a thousand words, I found the following juxtapositions to be curious, to put it mildly...

LEFT: Hitler prays at Nazi rally in Vienna circa 1940
RIGHT: Bush prays at prayer service circa 2004

LEFT: Hitler signs Bible for Christian supporter at Nazi gathering, date uncertain
RIGHT: Bush signs Bible for Christian supporter at Republican gathering in West Virginia, August 2004

LEFT: Hitler leaves the Marine Church in Wilhelmshaven
RIGHT: Bush leaves... well actually, there are no photos of Bush leaving church to be readily found. Probably because despite Christians being admonished to not forsake the assembly of their fellow believers, Bush is not known to regularly assemble with believers (whether they're his "fellows" or not is left as an exercise for the reader).

LEFT: Hitler gives the Nazi salute in front of a holy edifice in Nuremburg in 1934.
RIGHT: Bush gives an unholy salute in front of Barney the dog in 2003 (approx. date).

"Submitted for your approval."

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Trailer for Hotel Rwanda, and the first scholarly book about Oskar Schindler

This is now officially the first film of 2005 that I want to see. Last year it was Miracle and it didn't disappoint. This year it's going to be Hotel Rwanda with Don Cheadle and Nick Nolte, and I only decided that I wanted to see it this bad a short while ago when I read ComingSoon.net's interview with Cheadle and watched the trailer. I vaguely remember this, come to think of it: the hotel manager in Rwanda who turned his palatial resort into a safe haven for hundreds of refugees during that country's civil war a little over ten years ago. Here's the link to the trailer (in Quicktime format): even this short preview makes for some powerful stuff.

Kinda ironic that I'm just now finding out about this movie, 'cuz today I started reading Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind The List by David M. Crowe. I've been waiting to read this for a looooooong time: I've known Dr. Crowe for years 'cuz he was one of my history professors in college, and he told us way back in 1998 that he was working on this. There was Thomas Keneally's book in the early Eighties that led to Spielberg's movie, but Dr. Crowe's book is the first seriously resarched work (to the best of my knowledge Crowe was the last person to interview Schindler's widow before she died) to be produced. And at just 20 pages into it I think it can safely be said: this is going to raise a lot of eyebrows as word gets around about it. I'll post a review as soon as I can plow through this massive (and well annotated) tome.

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Reason #27 why Revenge Of The Sith WON'T disappoint.

The past few months I've been blissfully unaware of anything happening on the Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith front. But when Ain't It Cool News screamed that they had a ton of RotS pics I succumbed to the temptation. Still don't know most of what happens in this next movie (one of the reasons I had to retire from TheForce.net: spending almost 3 years before Episode II came out and learning EVERYTHING about it beforehand lessened my enjoyment of the final product) but the below image has good vibes coming out of that ugly face...

That's the soon-to-be-Emperor himself, Darth Sidious. Doesn't look too much like Palpatine does he? Well, from what I have heard SPOILER (highlight with mouse to read) there's a "reveal" scene where Palpatine is confronted by the senior Jedi and he transforms from the smiling statesman into the prunefaced powerhouse that you see here END SPOILER. One thing I do know for certain is that SPOILER we learn MUCH more about the Sith and their history in this movie, including discovering that Darth Sidious was once the apprentice of a Sith named Darth Plagueis... whose Dark Side studies may bode ill for a certain future member of the cult END SPOILER.

What else can be said but "kewl!"

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Republican-resurrected Reich? Vox Day suggests as much.

Gotta love Vox Day: for one thing he's a brilliant Christian thinker. That focus on things from the eternal perspective makes his essays noticably bereft of the temporal goals that muddle the minds of many other essayists. He's also a published science-fiction writer, which merits his being way up on the geek totem pole of respect and awe (am trying to figure out where I fit in this scheme of things: I've written some sci-fi but haven't sought to publish it, but am almost finished making a short sci-fi film that will be distributed... so maybe I'm a "quasi-master geek" :-) And he's one of the darned few columnists that I make it a point to read every time he's got something to say: there ain't many real intuitive thinkers in this world since Thomas Aquinas back in the day, and I like to study what few masters that there are.

Well anyhoo, Day's got a new piece this week called "Anti-Christian America" and he's wondering aloud why it is that the "party of less government" is leading the charge toward turning history's most free nation into its most state-dominated. Consider the Intelligence Reform Act (that nobody can admit to reading before passing into law). Day doesn't believe the American people should yield any more of their freedoms to the government...

Well, we yielded more nevertheless, thanks to our Republican administration, House and Senate. It is clear that the American people have been betrayed with this so-called reform bill by again having their liberties sacrificed on the altar of homeland security. It stuns me that so many supposed champions of freedom support these abominable actions – I can't even imagine the howls of outrage were it President Hillary Clinton leading the charge for such a step toward 1984-style government

It's a doozy of an article. Punch here for the rest.

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Happy New Year!

'Nuff said. That and also: May the mistakes of 2004 give us wisdom in 2005.

(Hey, I can be hopeful, right? :-)

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Christianity shouldn't "rise": it's most potent when it's fallen.

Found a piece by John Gleeson in the Winnipeg Sun titled "Christianity rises again in 2004". From the title alone I knew this was going to be headed in the way wrong direction. An excerpt:

Even in Canada, where secular liberalism has ruled for decades, 2004 has seen an unprecedented outpouring of scriptural argument as part of the national debate over same-sex marriage. Never in recent history have so many Canadians publicly stated their unswerving commitment to Christian principles...

Part of this new, vocal Christianity is undoubtedly a reaction to the rhetorical zealotry -- and actual threats -- of Islamic extremists. And part of it has to be a reaction to the increasingly shallow popular culture that surrounds us.

Gleeson is trying to frame Christianity within temporal boundaries... which isn't where it belongs at all. Hence, he continues the sin that many Christians - cogent of it or not - commit: that having a faith in Christ can be a tool to be wielded in this world. For good, no doubt... but inevitably becoming a leverage for power.

Christians aren't supposed to be a "faction" in this world. We are called to be out of it and beyond it, but with hearts sympathetic toward those still within it. Dropping us back into the world can only serve to add our own weaknesses to it, albeit with those weaknesses bolstered by a self-righteousness little seen from any other faith. Why then should we resurrect that which we are called to crucify?

I'm going to keep saying this 'til I'm dead or whatever: Christians aren't called to have power. We are called to serve Christ. And it's way past time that we started doing that.

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Most Americans are... well... idiots. And slaves.

Maybe it's because the end of the year usually elicits reflection on the past twelve months that I've been putting the serious thinking into overdrive lately. So here goes one more (probably not the last before 2005 hits).

The American people are idiots. The men, women and children of the United States are too lazy and willing to be led around like they had a chain through their collective noses to deserve freedom at all, for the most part anyway. Actually, they don't want freedom to live and think for themselves: they want someone else to do it for them. So it is that the American people have become a slave race.

For the past several months we saw most of this land's citizenry get whipped-up into a frothing frenzy over two men who wanted the White House. How often did it occur to us that neither one deserved what they wanted? Or that we do not have to be locked into the "two-party" mindset... if we didn't want to, anyway.

Come to think of it, when was the last time someone came out and asked aloud "Did God give the Democrat and Republican parties a monopoly over this country?"

And if they're acting like God did, when the Hell are we going to knock both of them off that high horse and start running this country on our own, per the stewardship that God gave us, as in "we the people"?

Americans like to believe that their government is keeping them safe. Yeah, trusting the same politicians who not only won't secure our borders (a requisite for any nation to maintain its vitality) but openly invite outsiders to storm onto our turf, taking up resources and jobs and other things that we should be keeping to ourselves. That ain't selfishness, folks: America should be jealous of her own resources in a lot of ways. It's the only thing that's made America so productive a nation... not to mention charitable. Think any other country could give as much to the disaster relief following the Southeast Asian tsunami as we are? And we're criticized for not giving enough even. Hey, we're giving to them even after a lot of those countries started getting our good-paying jobs in the high-tech sector: if they wanna complain, they can earn their own relief money. But in the meantime we should do what we can to make sure we can KEEP giving to those who need it (meaning no more blank checks for you to pay Palestinians and other terrorists with, Mr. President) by tightening our borders (on which you're committing treason, Mr. President). Why most Americans don't care about that when it's sapping away at their livelihood... well, I suppose that so long as Wal-Mart has their precious "Friends" DVDs on sale, everything should be hunky-dory.

The American people should not trust government at all to keep them safe. They should first and foremost trust God. Then trust themselves. They should trust themselves with guns and trust God to give them consciences not to use those guns unless absolutely required. That said, they should NOT just "shut up and take it" when corrupt people in government start rolling over them. God gave us freedom, not man. God doesn't take away without reason, but man takes away on the slightest whim. And if any man - be it crooked politicians or abusive cops, from the lowest dogcatcher to the highest office in the land - starts eroding at what God has bestowed upon us, there becomes not just a rationale, but a compelling moral obligation to resist that erosion by whatever means necessary: the soap box ideally, the bullet box if need be. But given that the American people have lost their will to resist that our forefathers had, if they wanna get screwed-over by those who want more power over them... well, so be it. At least some of us have chosen that their own children will be free, at least.

Okay, there's more I can rant about, but I've a full day ahead. More later, no doubt.

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Environmentalist kooks take note: Man CANNOT destroy the world!

And the 9.0 earthquake in Southeast Asia two days ago proves it. The biggest quake in 40 years was so strong that it slowed down the Earth's rotation by approximately 3 microseconds. It was a release of more energy than all the nuclear weapons that all the world's nations have ever produced. It might have moved the island of Sumatra 100 feet from where it originally lay. One estimate has the death toll at 60,000 and possibly climbing to 100,000 or more. The Christmas 2004 earthquake will go down as one of the worst disasters in human history...

...and this is supposed to pale in comparison to the threat of undisposed styrofoam cups?

There's no need to go over what's already been said in the wake of this tragedy: our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Southeast Asia that got hit by this thing, and unfortunately that's all that a lot of us can do right now. But in my mind, it reinforced something I started realizing about ten years or so ago: man can't destroy the Earth, because man doesn't possess the power to destroy the Earth. And it's the acme of egotism to think that we can, in light of an event like this. And I'm not aiming this post at ALL environmentalists either, because I do believe that each and every one of us should be good stewards of the Earth, and be responsible with the respect that's due it. But to those claiming that we have the ability - whether intentional or ignorant - to destroy it completely... now, that's some bravura.

Two things I'll throw out there right now, if anyone's interested: first, Dixie Lee Ray (the late former governor of Washington state) wrote two books years ago called Trashing the Planet and Environmental Overkill that should be absolute MUST reading if you want to know more about the relationships between man and the environment. I read both while a college student over ten years ago (on my own time by the way) and Miss Ray's work REALLY propelled my thinking on this subject into what was then taboo ground.

And then there's this: toward the end of Jurassic Park (the novel, not the film version that I've always thought Spielberg completely botched-up apart from the music and sheer special effects) Ian Malcolm gives what's almost a complete monologue about "destroying the world". Years ago Charlton Heston read the novel and called up Rush Limbaugh's radio show, saying that he wanted to read the passage aloud for Limbaugh's radio audience. I managed to record it and played it over and over so many times over the years that I memorized the whole thing. It's adapted very slightly from the original novel, and I wish I could locate a soundfile of this on the 'net, but just imagine Charlton Heston's voice reading the following from Jurassic Park:

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity! Let me tell you something about our planet: Earth is four and a half billion years old. There has been life on it for nearly that long: three-point-eight billion years. Bacteria first, later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea and on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals: the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals. Each one enduring millions on millions of years. Great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away... all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval: mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away. Cometary impacts. Volcanic eruptions. Oceans rising and falling. Whole continents moving in an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. And it will certainly survive us.

If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the Earth was sizzling-hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere. Under the soil, frozen the Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain variety and of course it would be very different from what it is now, but the Earth would survive our folly. Only we would not.

If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the Earth... so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It's a corrosive gas, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on Earth. Those plants were polluting the environment: exhaling a lethal gas! Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless life on Earth took care of itself.

In the thinking of a human being a hundred years is a long time: hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers, or vaccines. It was a whole different world. But to the Earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms... and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we were gone tomorrow, the Earth would not miss us.

In that context, the Indonesia earthquake is almost a blessing: how often is it that we become privy to the life-pulse of this Earth on so grand a scale?

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