... when its President's biggest priority is to let it be overrun by illegal aliens.
George W. Bush = biggest traitor in United States history.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
COWARDICE AT CENTRAL OFFICE: School Board plays games with outraged citizens on school uniforms, refuses to acknowledge public outcry
Cowardice.
It's an ugly word. It's not one to lightly employ. It's certainly not one that I've ever felt comfortable with using, regardless of the situation. In fact, I don't know if I've ever used "cowardice" in a piece of serious writing at all. Ever. It doesn't show up when I scan this blog for it. It certainly isn't something that I've been chomping at the bit for the chance to get to use it someday.
I've tried my best to avoid it.
But sometimes, when reflecting on your feelings, you run out of descriptors that define your estimation of what it is that you've seen. There's one word that's staring straight back at you and despite your damndest efforts, there's no other alternative. You have to use it. Because it really does sum up everything that you've just witnessed...
And what I saw last night, was cowardice.
I refuse to say "cowardly". That is an adjective to describe a person and I know a number of these people too darned well than to think that of them at all. I know they're better than this... or they're supposed to be, anyway. I won't say that they are cowardly... but I will absolutely say that I am extremely disappointed in them.
I know you are reading this, those of you who I am talking about. Last night you did something that, not in a million years, would I have thought you would ever do.
Oh yes, at times we've certainly disagreed on a number of things. That was okay. Because I respected you and, I thought anyway, that you respected me and everyone else who would come to speak before the board. But even so, I never believed that I could expect anything less than your most honorable effort, as best as you were able to muster it.
To whom it may concern: last night, you let me down.
And you let down the vast majority of Rockingham County.
I would even dare say that you let down a lot of the things that this country is supposed to stand for.
In your heart of hearts, you probably want to believe that you did a pretty smart thing last night. But the only thing that you have to show for the evening is... well, cowardice.
And now I have to call you out on it. Your cowardice is going to be a permanent fixture on the Internet. Decades from now, anyone who searches for what the Rockingham County Board of Education in North Carolina did on June 11th, 2007 will find that they acted smug and indifferent and betraying toward the public trust. And... well yeah, cowardly. They certainly did act cowardly, in the adverb sense.
I have to report this. And I really didn't want to do that at all.
So here it goes...
As you might know already, at the April 16th meeting the Rockingham County Board of Education voted 8 to 4 to mandate school uniforms - or what is euphemistically being called "Standard Mode Of Dress" – at Reidsville Middle School and Reidsville High School starting this coming school year. They voted to implement "S.M.O.D." in spite of massive public turnout against the uniforms.
And they also based their vote for the uniforms on what I can only describe as a blatant fraud. In the months leading up to the March work session (which is when the motion was made to put S.M.O.D. up for a vote at the April regular meeting) there was a "survey" done, mostly by telephone, of Reidsville parents. It was an automated system that told whoever answered the phone that this was a survey being conducted to gauge public sentiment for the school uniforms. People were then given a choice: press "1" to say that they were in approval of having uniforms, or press "2" to say that they wanted more information about school uniforms.
That was it. There was no "press '3' if you do not want school uniforms". There wasn't any "no" option given at all. Parents called had to choose either to agree with the idea of uniforms, or to receive "more information". Months later and that "information" has yet to materialize.
As I said in my spiel during the public comments portion of the meeting tonight, it guaranteed that the results of the survey would be as lopsided as an election in communist Russia.
It wasn't a scientific survey at all. It seems too much like it was meant to deliberately massage the data, in order to generate perceived favoritism toward having school uniforms. Was it intentional? I don't know. If it was, then the motives behind this "survey" were downright criminal. If not, it was thoughtless and sloppy work, at best. The board should have contracted with someone from outside the county, with no connection to the schools or any other vested interest in having uniforms, to conduct a fair survey... that is, if the desire was to legitimately determine whether or not the parents seriously did want the uniforms. In any case, this fraudulent "survey" should have tainted any current drive toward having the uniforms, and too much to pursue them at this time.
Well, the board still voted to have the uniforms at the two schools. At the next board meeting on May 7th, even more incensed parents and students came to address the board about the uniforms, with many stating that there had not been a thoroughly-enough announced intent to bring this matter to a vote on the part of the board: it had been too rushed. Worse, many strongly argued that how the original motion was made to bring a vote to the issue violated the board's own bylaws and other regulations. Everyone who went to the podium during public comments condemned the S.M.O.D.: nobody spoke in favor of it. Later during the meeting, long after public comments had closed, the board moved to put further discussion about the uniforms on the agenda for the next meeting.
That came last night.
Board members Celeste DePriest and Steve Smith (both of whom had voted against the uniforms at the April meeting) were absent.
The lunacy started right after the Pledge of Allegiance: board member and former chairman Wayne Kirkman immediately made a motion to remove Item 7.9 – discussion about Standard Mode of Dress - off the agenda for the night's meeting!!! To say that this outraged members of the public – who numbered even more than the last two meetings – would be a severe understatement. I heard more than a few muffled curses from my vantage point in the audience directed toward Kirkman. Well, the motion was voted on and I didn't catch who else voted "aye" on it but one member who did vote for Kirkman's motion was Ronald Filer Price, AKA Ron Price: the morally bankrupt publicly-confessed thief, keeper of "enemies lists", bold-faced liar and violator of the Constitutional rights of others. The motion failed to carry, and the agenda was consequently approved.
(EDIT 6:26 p.m. EST: I've since learned that apparently it was Tim Scales who seconded Kirkman's motion to strip discussion of Standard Mode Of Dress off the agenda.)Following this a number of awards and recognitions were made, and then the Hearing of Individuals – better known as public comments portion of the meeting – got underway. And after last night's meeting I'm going to make an effort to videotape all future meetings that I attend. Videotape the speakers and the board members' reactions and then probably edit it together for posting on YouTube for everyone to see. For one reason, the presence of a camera and citizen video journalist might make give some board members reason to pause. But mostly it's so I can better report on everything that gets said during this part of the meeting. A few came to speak about incidents of school violence. Most came to denounce the school uniforms.
I was the fifth speaker who signed up to speak. When my turn came I went to the podium, introduced myself and then started out with this...
"We've already had two meetings where the case against the Standard Mode Of Dress has been passionately argued. There is little I could say that would reinforce what you already know: that Standard Mode Of Dress would be an added exorbitant cost to many families, that it is ridiculous to insist on this when the present dress code isn't even enforced, and the sheer fact of the matter that the parents and students do not want this. That much at least should have been made very clear in the past two meetings..."I then took a few moments to comment on how of all the people who had come out to speak against the uniforms, it was the younger ones – the students who would be most affected by this thing – who had been some of the most passionate and articulate and eloquent speakers that I had ever heard in this kind of public venue. "I really wish that I had been that good at your age!" I told them.
The rest of my time at the podium was completely ad-libbed, so I don't have precise notes on it. But the gist of my argument was that there was no way the Board of Education could morally let this vote stand: because it was a vote made with fraudulent information that may or may not have been deliberately manipulated. I made the comment that "isn't this country in enough trouble because of falsified intelligence?" People in the audience seemed to like that one.
To close it out, I went into a story: "Once upon a time..." Plenty of laughing at that, which was great! I talked about the time in 1994 that there was another meeting of the Rockingham County Board of Education, and how the big item was a controversial subject that brought out people by the hundreds. And how I had originally planned to speak in favor of this issue but after hearing the arguments of those who went before me, I realized that I couldn't, with any clear conscience, still hold to my position. So I had to get up to the podium that night and tell the school board and everyone that I had changed my mind. It was a tough thing to do, especially for a twenty-year old kid... but I had to do it. "There is nothing shameful with admitting that you are wrong," I told the board last night. "You do this, and you are going to get a lot of respect from the public..."
... and then I added that "Some of you need all the respect from the public that you can get."
(With God as my witness, I did not see what some reported to me about what happened next, nor will I make a comment about it here. It's going to forever be something that I will have to envision in my mind. Maybe it's more fun that way...)
Long story short, I returned to my seat and many others rose in turn to condemn the Standard Mode of Dress. All told, public comments went on for about two hours or so. Again, nobody spoke in favor of the school uniforms. And of all the recent meetings, I can honestly say that the arguments from those who spoke tonight were easily the most fervent and convincing... and brutally heartfelt honest. Which makes what happened later in the meeting that much more frustrating and treacherous.
After everyone who had signed to speak had done so, board chairwoman Elaine McCollum called for a break. Following the break the board went into the agenda's action items (funding for this "Dan River Water Easement" thingy should be brought up in comments at the next meeting 'cuz I heard more than one person in the audience raise a concern about it). This went on for a good while and then the board got to Part 7 on the agenda: "Reports/Discussion Items".
(That 7.9, discussion about the uniforms, was the very last thing for discussion on the agenda should do more than raise eyebrows. The board should know that plenty enough people wondered if this was a conscious choice to put this at the tail end of everything so that members of the public would eventually get tired and go home. I'm not saying that absolutely is what happened with last night’s meeting... but that was definitely the suspicion of quite a number of those in the audience. However it was placed, the attrition rate was far lower than I had seen at any other school board meeting since I started attending regularly... which should say something in itself about how angry a lot of people are about this uniforms mess.)
It wasn't until around 11 o'clock that the board got to discussing Standard Mode of Dress. Now, something to bear in mind here: a wazoo-load of principals (and probably some other administrators) are being juggled around the schools in the Rockingham County system starting this coming year. Meaning that Reidsville High School will have an entirely new principal: one who, if the board persists in this insane scheme, will not only have to deal with the intricacies of coming to the helm of another school, but will also be mandated to implement the uniforms policy.
Board member John Smith raised that obvious point. And it soon became apparent to all that the entire procedure to approve and put in place the Standard Mode Of Dress at Reidsville High and Reidsville Middle had been, not to put too fine a point on it, "bass-ackwards".
Then came the most despicable part of the entire evening...
The board members... look, as I'm writing this it's 4:30 a.m., I was at the Central Office from 5:30 p.m. until past midnight and in all this time I haven't stopped a moment for rest, so forgive me if I'm too wiped-out to care about who exactly said what in particular, but I'm speaking primarily about the ones who voted for this immorally-conceived obscenity to begin with... began what can only be described as the Rockingham County Board of Education's perverse version of Dean Smith's "Four Corners Play":
The board refused to acknowledge anything that the public speakers had said at all! Not once did they bring up any concern that anyone from the public had raised in opposition to the school uniforms. Instead they used the thing about the new principal at Reidsville High, and the now-suddenly-critical issue of "oh but do we actually have time now to implement this thing before the school year starts?" to completely dodge the issues that we had spent all evening talking to them about.
The motion was made to continue discussion at the next meeting. Any one of those who had previously voted for the uniforms (including Herman Hines, even though he abstained from the April vote... although it still count as a "yes" vote, go figure) could have made a motion to rescind the vote for the uniforms. In a sane world, that is exactly what would have happened: someone, anyone on that board who had voted for the uniforms should have had some change of heart, after listening to all of those people. That is, if they had been listening at all.
Instead, every one who came to speak at last night's meeting about the Standard Mode Of Dress... did it for nothing.
For all the time taken away from things we'd rather have been doing, for all the gas we spent driving to Eden to speak about something that never should have happened to begin with and has already wasted plenty of money... it was as if we hadn't even been there at all.
To those who know whom I'm addressing when I say this: dammit, didn't you listen to anything that was said last night?
Too many people gave up their valuable time and money to address you last night. And you acted as if you didn't give a flying rat's butt about any of them.
Instead, the board members who had voted in favor of the uniforms in April, I think it was pretty apparent that the majority of all but the most obstinate of them (I'm looking at you Mr. Sign Thief) was trying to find a way out of this mess that they had put themselves in, without having to admit that they were wrong. Nobody I've talked to thinks Mr. Sign Thief would do anything approximating an admission of error, but that's to be expected anyway...
It was a total failure on the part of those who voted for Standard Mode Of Dress to own up having screwed up. Last night could have been a bright and shining moment for them. They could have earned our respect, in a way that very few public officials seem interested in doing these days.
Instead, they wasted it... so that they could try to look good politically.
Don't try to wheedle your way out of this, those of you who know who you are. You refused to look us in the eye and face up to the fact that you were wrong.
You decided last night that you weren't going to hold yourselves accountable to those of us who put you in those school board seats to begin with.
I told you that there was nothing shameful about admitting that you were wrong. Now look at you: I saw very little not to be shameful over last night.
And what did it gain you?
Nothing but a lot of honked-off parents and students, and one former school board candidate who swore he would try to do what's right whether or not he won a seat in the election, along with most of the rest of Rockingham County.
Let me put it this way: a lot of people are pissed at what you are doing. At what you have done.
In the brief hours since the end of the meeting last night, I have seen more anger and rancor and feelings of ill will directed at those of you on the board who voted for the uniforms, than I have ever seen generated from any other issue in all the time that I have lived in Rockingham County (which has been most of my life).
I don't want to begin to write here some of the things that I have heard and have been sent to me since last night. I will say this though: "assassination" is not on the list of options that have been suggested. Not yet, anyway. But I've heard plenty enough that should drop jaws all over the place if I were to share them here.
You should at least know that one way or another, none of your jobs are safe anymore. I have to wonder if that even really bothers you, though. You came across as so hard-hearted during last night's meeting, it is an open question in my mind as to whether anything could faze your stubbornness or your arrogance.
It's late. I have literally been up all night since the meeting, trying my best to accurately convey what happened last night and to put my thoughts in order about all of this. I wish that I could put it out of mind for the time being...
...except for the matter of having witnessed an act of cowardice, that is bothering me too much.
Like I said: you let me down. You let all of us down. And we're not going to let you forget it.
So... where do we go from here?
Like I said, it's late. Way late. But I'm going to write more about this very soon. Along with a few other things.
But in the meantime, to those of you who share my disappointment with how the Board of Education chose to act last night, I will leave you with this "teaser"...
"If a created being has no rights to which his creator is bound to respect, there is an end to all moral relations between them."That goes for relations between people and their governments, too.-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
More soon.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Comparisons between Ron Paul and 300
So Saturday night I saw 300 again, this time in Raleigh with my friend Chad. And I think that of all the movies that I have seen so far this year, 300 is easily my favorite, and the best overall in my opinion. I just found out that it's coming out on DVD next month, too!
If you haven't seen 300 yet, remember how riled-up a lot of us got when Braveheart came out? 300 is that kind of blood-stirring good. This is exactly the kind of story we need for the time we live in. And YouTube user BoruJudasDedrich feels the same way, too...
Here's the video that he put together, comparing what's going on regarding presidential candidate Ron Paul with Leonidas and the Spartans in 300. I found myself thinking much the same on Saturday night when we were watching this... but I really doubt that I could have done anything as beautiful and passionate as what BoruJudasDedrich has done here. Just one thing I want to know: where did he get all that 300 footage?!? :-)
Crazy good weekend! Report from Pixelodeon and the Ron Paul video becomes a YouTube hit!
Most of this weekend was spent in Raleigh. I left Reidsville at about 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon and reached my friend Chad's place a little after 6. For the past five weeks I've been studying my brains out for the Praxis exam: that's the big series of tests given to prospective teachers. It was actually two exams that I took on Saturday: one that morning for content knowledge, and the second later that afternoon on teaching methods. And, I think that I did pretty well on them! The first was over a hundred multiple-choice questions that you had to use a number-2 pencil to fill in those little bubbles for your answers, but the second was stuff you had to think about and write out. Basically that exam provided two knowledge areas that you had to make lesson plans out of. Even though that was the harder of the two, I had more fun doing that one. I left the testing center at St. Augustine's College feeling pretty upbeat about it. I should find out in a few weeks how well I did.
And later that evening, Chad and I went out for pizza and then drove to a theater to watch 300: his first time seeing it and my second (here's my review from when Dad and I saw it in April). I drove back home later on Sunday afternoon.
Meanwhile, other stuff had been going on all weekend...
This was the weekend that the first annual Pixelodeon Independent Video Festival was going on at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Three-hundred-some selected videos were screened at this thing... including that first commercial from my school board campaign! Wish I could have flown out for this thing, but I had to stay and take the Praxis exam. But I did receive some great news about the kind of reception that my commercial got at the event: one of the curators told me that "It was fantastic!" He said that people loved it and that they were "disappointed" when told that I hadn't won the election. I told him that if people enjoyed it that much, then I'd have rather had that than have won the election (not that I wasn't trying my best to win, 'course :-) So hearing about the feedback from Pixelodeon has definitely already made my week...
...as has the reaction to my first pro-Ron Paul for President video: it made it all the way to #10 on the "Top Rated News & Politics" videos on YouTube for this past Saturday! At one point it was the third highest-ranked Ron Paul video for that day. A lot of people have left some awfully nice comments about it on the video's page. And quite a few of them have one burning question above all others: "Did those photos clog-up your toilet?!?" Miraculously, they did not... but it was definitely a concern that I'd had. And there've been a few more ideas for Ron Paul videos that I've had in the past couple of days. Might make another real soon.
And, that was my weekend. Between the serious task to overcome and the groovy response to those videos, and the great fellowship that I had with a lifelong friend, and the conscious choice to completely abstain from blogging or any other routine activity that I usually involve myself in and what a refreshing respite it was, this weekend pretty much had it all.
If only it could last... 'cuz tonight is going to be one insane school board meeting, if the last two were any indication :-P Will report on that later tonight.
And there's something else I'll be posting about later on today: my own lil' way of celebrating the weekend's success :-)
Friday, June 08, 2007
My first commercial will be shown at Pixelodeon at American Film Institute this weekend!
Just one more post before I really absolutely do take a self-imposed sabbatical from blogging for the next few days: it was first mentioned last week that the first commercial from my school board campaign - the "zany" Star Wars-inspired ad - will be screened this weekend at the first-ever Pixelodeon Independent Video Festival at the American Film Institute... in Hollywood! So if you're in Los Angeles for the next few days, I guess you can stop by and watch the Death Star blow up a schoolhouse.
Hey, it helped get me almost forty-seven hundred votes, didn't it?? :-)
My first video for the Ron Paul cause
It's late. I've been working on this video since yesterday afternoon. Had some weird encoding problems. But the first "political advertisement" I've made in support of Ron Paul for President is all finished now, and uploaded to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. I call it "Sick and Tired and Needing a Doctor" ...
This is like the third or fourth production I've done lately that involves me being shown with a toilet: parse that as you will. But all the same, I think this turned out rather nice. What do you think? :-)
Okay, this is a good enough post to close out the week with. I'm going to take a break from blogging for the next few days. Have a great weekend y'all!
EDIT 11:47 a.m. EST: The video has been posted on Daily Paul! After this update I really am stepping away from the 'puter for a few days. The video seems to be spreading around. Wonder how many views it'll have when I get back...?
First trailer for I AM LEGEND
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is one of the most haunting novels that I've ever read. The project to make a modern-day film adaptation of it (it's been turned into a movie twice already, the last one being The Omega Man with Charlton Heston) is something that's been simmering for over ten years now: yeah I still remember the days when Ridley Scott was going to make this with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It finally comes out this December, with Will Smith as Robert Neville.
And, I've no sense this early on about how faithful this movie will be to the spirit of the book... but I think it might have some promise. The first trailer certainly impresses. There is one shot that is one of the flat-out coolest that I've ever seen in a movie... or at least the trailer for one.
EDIT 4:38 a.m. EST: Pray for the last man on Earth... because he's not alone. Here's the first 10 minutes of The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston as Neville (the role Smith will have in I Am Legend). By the way, this movie's awesome soundtrack was composed by Ron Grainer: the man who also created the immortal theme music for Doctor Who.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Illegals amnesty dead in Senate (but could still come back)
It's down for now, but it sounds like the bastitches trying to push this through are gonna come back around for another pass.
This bill is just one more indication why Ted Kennedy is about 40 years past any real usefulness in the Senate (if that much).
"Autobots are watching you!"
After starting to feel so much good vibe the past few weeks about Transformers coming out next month, only to find this... thing.
It's a 2007 update to the "Transformers" theme song (MP3 file in .zip format) on the Sector Seven promo website for Transformers.
This doesn't raise my hopes any about the movie, y'all...
Live free or DIE HARD!
voteronpaul08 at Ron Paul Forums asked if I could do a Ron Paul thing with the Live Free or Die Hard poster. Here's what I came up with...
Now they're re-making THE THING and making a movie out of EMPIRE?!
Some days it just doesn't pay to take a look on the cultural front...
Ronald D. Moore, the guy who re-created Battlestar Galactica for the Sci-Fi Channel (and did an amazing job of it from the looks of things), is now working on a remake of The Thing...
...which might not be an altogether bad thing. John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing was already a remake, and Moore is a pretty capable guy. But it's going to be darn awful hard to top what we saw in the 1982 movie. 25 yeas later (what was it about 1982 that made it a great year for this kind of movie genre?) and it's still holding up very strong.
Then comes word that Warner Bros. is making a movie of Orson Scott Card's Empire. Which will probably be as big a box office smash as Battlefield Earth was. As I said in my review back in December, Empire is a bad, bad book! Usually I devour an Orson Scott Card novel. With Empire I had to struggle to overcome it like a man constipated. And I really do like Card a lot! I think he's one of the few legitimately leading intellectual lights of our age. He just struck out with Empire, the same way that Steven Spielberg struck out with 1941: they can't all be winners, right? Just the same, this is one project that should be quietly shelved.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Shirley Phelps-Roper arrested for letting son stomp on American flag
Remember this lady? It's Shirley Phelps-Roper. It will be a year ago next week that she and her family - the infamous Westboro Baptist Church - visited the TV station that I worked at. This is that "God hates fags church" that does those rabid anti-homosexual protests... most of them quite bizarre and all of them crossing the boundary of good taste. If you missed that report when it was filed last year, mash that link down for some truly disturbing photos along with my account of what happened that night during my close encounter with "the Phelps family".Well, Shirley Phelps-Roper has been arrested in Bellevue, Nebraska: charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor after her 8-year old son stomped on an American flag during a soldier's funeral.
Boy Stomps Flag At Funeral, Mom ArrestedI've said it before and I'll say it again: someday, the Phelps family is going to go way too far in front of the way wrong people... and some of them are going to be hurt or worse because of their antics. They won't have anyone to blame but themselves.Pair Are Part Of Anti-Gay Church That Protests Funerals
POSTED: 1:44 pm EDT June 6, 2007
OMAHA, Neb. -- A woman was arrested in Bellevue, Neb., on Tuesday during the funeral for a fallen soldier.
Shirley Phelps-Roper was arrested on suspicion of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for allegedly allowing her 8-year-old son to stomp on an American flag.
Phelps-Roper is a member of a Topeka, Kan., church that conducts anti-homosexual picketing at funeral services for U.S. soldiers.
Hundreds of people packed Bellevue streets Tuesday morning to pay tribute to a firefighter and soldier. Spc. Bill Bailey was serving in the National Guard in Iraq when he was killed by a roadside bomb.
Police said the group to which Phelps-Roper belongs had a permit to protest 300 feet from Bailey's funeral.
Bellevue Officer Joe Gray, who made the arrest, said that at first the group brought out a couple of members' own American flags.
"The arrestee, Ms. Phelps-Roper, put one around her waist. The second one was given to a 10-year-old, who put it on the ground and started kicking it in the area they were protesting," Gray said.
Nebraska law states that it is a Class 3 misdemeanor when a person "intentionally casts contempt or ridicule upon a flag by mutilating, defacing, defiling, burning or trampling upon such flag." The law was passed in 1977.
"It appears the adults weren't stepping on the flag because they knew it was a violation of the law. But they allowed the children to go ahead and do that," Gray said.
Phelps-Roper said she believes she has the right to use the flag as a symbol, and said Nebraska's law is outdated.
"We're going to challenge that statute," she said. "That statue should have been repealed."
Gray said the arrest wasn't personal and has nothing to do with his beliefs. He said he's simply doing his job.
"It's state law, so we were enforcing the laws of Nebraska," the officer said.
Sarpy County Attorney Lee Polikov said the words from the group are fighting words, which are not protected speech.
He's got as good a chance as anyone else ...
One can only wonder about what kind of America we would have today if he had been elected in 1992.
WARNING: The following blog post may trigger seizures and nausea
They unveiled the logo for the 2012 London Olympics earlier this week and it's so magnificently malformed that some are claiming that it could trigger seizures in people with epilepsy...
It reminded me of something that happened almost ten years ago. On December 17th 1997, Japanese television broadcast an episode of the popular Pokemon show. During the episode there is one scene that has intense rapid red/blue blinking. In the minutes and hours following that scene, hundreds of Japanese children were rushed to hospitals because that sequence caused those kids to suffer seizures, convulsions, fainting, extreme headaches and nausea! The flashing was taken out of subsequent airings of the episode.
So... wanna see it? Here it is, with the original video unedited. If this link goes bad just do a search on YouTube for "pokemon" and "seizures" or "epilepsy". But I'm seriously warning you: I watched this thing, and it did give me a headache. I'm just posting this as an example that the fears about the new Olympics symbol aren't necessarily frivolous.
Here it is: the banned Pokemon "seizures" sequence. Remember, you watch this at your own risk...
They are re-making CONAN THE BARBARIAN
That's it. Hollywood is officially a depleted sow. The field has been plowed and planted so many times that nothing fresh is growing in it. It's dead, Jim.
Find out about it here, in a story primarily about another remake (of Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill).
Incidentally, I watched last year's remake of The Omen a few days ago on HBO. That was another classic movie that never warranted a remake, at all. The same is true for Conan the Barbarian (can you believe a few weeks ago was the 25th anniversary of it's premiere?).
In my opinion, Conan the Barbarian is about as perfect a movie as you can find. So many great elements all working together in that film... The soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is easily one of the most listened-to things on my MP3 player whenever I'm driving (I love all the tracks but I'm especially fond of "Anvil of Crom" and "Atlantean Sword"). Poledouris is now gone from us. As is Mako: it would not be a Conan movie without Mako, I hate to say. Look, this was the movie that brought Oliver Stone and John Milius to work together: if that doesn't speak volumes about this film's power, I don't know what will.
Conan the Barbarian had something going for it, that can never be replicated. And this remake will suck donkeys balls to no end for trying (yes I actually said that, which is the worst insult I ever give to anything or anyone). Don't do this, Hollywood: you're skating on thin ice as it is...
"And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!"
VIDEO: Giuliani staff uses police to arrest independent journalist
If only YouTube had existed in 2000...
In October of 2000 I was a reporter with an independent newspaper. And - through legitimate channels mind ya - I had been given an invitation to attend a rally for George W. Bush during the presidential debate at Wake Forest University. I was hoping to get a chance to ask Bush a few questions: nothing rude mind ya, but I was gonna try to make the most of the opportunity.
Bush staff found out that some "non-corporate" journalists were there and sent Winston-Salem police to track us down. One of them demanded to see my driver's license and I asked why. About then a Bush staffer with a bullhorn came over and told me that I should do what she says "because whenever someone in a uniform tells you something you're supposed to obey."
This guy demanded to see my invitation. He snatched it out of my hands and said that I wasn't going to be attending this function. When I demanded to know why he threatened me with physical violence.
The cops escorted another reporter and myself to "the protest area" (this was the first time I'd ever heard of this little Bush concept) and told us if we tried to return to our vehicles through the fair grounds that we would be arrested.
A few years later I heard - and I've not found any reason to doubt this - that we were rounded up and sent packing on Bush's orders, after he heard that there were non-corporate media present and he told his staff to "haul those assholes out of here".
That night I saw the true side of the George W. Bush mindset. I'm not bitter about it now though: I'm just thankful that God showed me what a loser Bush really is, before I ever had a chance to vote for him (never have).
Almost the exact same thing happened last night to journalist Matt Lepacek following the Republican debate in New Hampshire, except Lepacek actually got ask Rudolph Guiliani some questions. Or tried to anyway. Giuliani's staff had police arrest Lepacek. Here's the video:
Y'know, the only thing that kept me from standing up to those goons that night any more than I did was the fact that my best friend was coming in from way out of town to spend a few days at my apartment, and if I was in jail then I couldn't be there when he arrived. If that hadn't already been on my schedule, I think years later that it would be with a lot of pride that I could look back at being arrested on orders from Bush.
I hope that Matt Lepacek will feel proud about what he did tonight too: he stood his ground against an evil man. And he didn't back down.
That's something that nobody will ever be able to take away from him.
Need an extra-large version of the Ron Paul/Matrix graphic?
Since last night I have received numerous requests for a much larger version of the Ron Paul graphic that apes the poster for The Matrix (which also features some not-so-subtle commentary). Seems that some folks are wanting to make full-size posters of this...
