Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Update: fixed typo in title

It’s gonna have computer-generated Jabba the Hutt.

But Ridley Scott is releasing a huge-ass box set with five versions of the movie (including the workprint!), and evidently none of them is a crappy 4:3 letterboxed transfer from a laser disc, so at least he has more respect for his own work than George Lucas has for his.

I don’t see the point, though. I suppose you could tinker and improve any work of art forever, but I think it’s better to just let it go. One director’s cut to get rid of the godawful voiceover narration that the studio forced you to include is a fine idea, but a third revision is pushing it.

Or is it? The new version is a new digital print with “updated” and “cleaned” special effects, according to Wikipedia. Whatever “updated” and “cleaned” mean. Hopefully they don’t mean pasting in Hayden Christensen’s ghost and making Greedo shoot first. Well, Scott already did the Blade Runner equivalent of making Greedo shoot first when he inserted that unicorn dream, and he claims he always intended Deckard to be a replicant. Anyway, with a movie like Blade Runner that relies so much on how it looks, maybe it makes sense to go back every decade or so and update the special effects, keep them from looking too dated.

Speaking of Deckard being a replicant, here’s what Fred Kaplan has to say about that in The New York Times:

This may disappoint some viewers. Deckard is the film’s one person with a conscience. If he’s a replicant, it means that there are no more decent human beings.

Is that why anybody is disappointed that Deckard is supposed to be a replicant?

If all humans died off and were replaced by robots which are entirely indistinguishable from humans, would that be sad?

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

So does anybody read this blog through the LiveJournal mirror, anyway? And if so, is there some reason I should let you keep doing so rather than making you read it on stevenberg.net or in a feed reader? I’m certain the answer to at least the second question and probably also the first is No, but I thought I’d ask before I stop mirroring to LiveJournal.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Scott Pelley interviews Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes: part one, part two. The entire interview is very much worth reading, but I quote some highlights below.

On Iran’s alleged support of anti-American jihadists in Iraq:

PELLEY: Mr. President, American men and women are being killed by your weapons in Iraq. You know this.

AHMADINEJAD: No, no, no.

PELLEY: Why are those weapons there?

AHMADINEJAD: Who’s saying that?

PELLEY: The American Army has captured Iranian missiles in Iraq. The critical elements of the explosively formed penetrator bombs that are killing so many people are coming from Iran. There’s no doubt about that anymore. The denials are no longer credible, sir.

AHMADINEJAD: Very good. If I may.

AHMADINEJAD: Are you an American politician? Am I to look at you as an American politician or a reporter? This is what the American officials are claiming. Well, we don’t need to arrest many people to prove that Americans are occupying Iraq or produce fabricated documents. If you go to the streets of Baghdad, you will see American helicopters and tanks and Humvees, so on and so forth. So the Iraqi people are just defending themselves. I think the way out for the American official from this problem that it has created for itself shouldn’t be in accusing Iraq, Iran, rather. You need to understand the realities of the region and also respect the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people, like other people, want to have security, want to have peace, want to be free. When they see that soldiers come into their houses, they react. So if the American government does accept this reality, this truth, everything will changes. If they accuse us 1,000 times, the truth will not change. They need to accept the truth and also the wishes of the Iraqi people. That is a way out of this deadlock.

On Iran’s alleged nuclear-weapons program:

PELLEY: You can show the world today that you are not pursuing a bomb. All you have to do is give the order. Open your nuclear facilities. Let the United Nations inspectors in there today and prove that there is no bomb program. Why not take that course?

AHMADEINEJAD: I think that you are a little bit behind the day’s news. You might have been away on an assignment. I don’t know.

PELLEY: I’m familiar with the day’s news.

AHMADEINEJAD: The reports say that we have been complying. And they are inspecting all of our sites every day. What more am I supposed to do?

(And there’s a great passage just after this about the hypocrisy and stupidity of all the nations that actually have nuclear weapons stockpiles that Pelley just ignores. It probably didn’t occur to him that Ahmadinejad was talking about the United States there.)

On President President Bush and religion:

PELLEY: What trait do you admire in President Bush?

AHMADINEJAD: Again, I have a very frank tone. I think that President Bush needs to correct his ways.

PELLEY: What do you admire about him?

AHMADINEJAD: He should respect the American people.

PELLEY: Is there anything? Any trait?

AHMADINEJAD: As an American citizen, tell me what trait do you admire?

PELLEY: Well, Mr. Bush is, without question, a very religious man, for example, as you are. I wonder if there’s anything that you’ve seen in President Bush that you admire.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, is Mr. Bush a religious man?

PELLEY: Very much so. As you are.

AHMADINEJAD: What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion to occupy another country and kill its people? Please tell me. Does Christianity tell its followers to do that? Judaism, for that matter? Islam, for that matter? What prophet tells you to send 160,000 troops to another country, kill men, women, and children? You just can’t wear your religion on your sleeve or just go to church. You should be truthfully religious. Religion tells us all that you should respect the property, the life of different people. Respect human rights. Love your fellow man. And once you hear that a person has been killed, you should be saddened. You shouldn’t sit in a room, a dark room, and hatch plots. And because of your plots, many thousands of people are killed. Having said that, we respect the American people. And because of our respect for the American people, we respectfully talk with President Bush. We have a respectful tone. But having said that, I don’t think that that is a good definition of religion. Religion is love for your fellow man, brotherhood, telling the truth.

PELLEY: I take it you can’t think of anything you like about President Bush.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I’m not familiar with the gentleman’s private life. Maybe in his private life he is very kind or a determined man. I’m not aware of that. I base my judgment on what I see in his public life. Having said that, I think that President Bush can behave much better. There were golden opportunities for President Bush. He should have used them better.

On which country is more isolated and hated in the world today, Iran or the United States:

PELLEY: I asked President Bush what he would say to you if he were sitting in this chair. And he told me, quote, speaking to you, that you’ve made terrible choices for your people. You’ve isolated your nation. You’ve taken a nation of proud and honorable people and made your country the pariah of the world. These are President Bush’s words to you. What’s your reply to the president?

AHMADINEJAD: Well, President Bush is free to think as he pleases and to say what he pleases. I don’t oppose the freedom of speech. I believe in freedom of speech. President Bush is free to say what he pleases. But these would not change the truth. So that President Bush knows the Iranian people are dearly loved today. We can very well put this to the test to find out who has become isolated. Again, maybe one of my friends could go to another country and a friend of President Bush could go to the same country, find out which one of us is isolated. You’re free to choose any country you like. I don’t think that President Bush has said these things. Rather, I prefer to think that this is your impression of what the president has said.

On Iran’s alleged nuclear-weapons program again, plus U.S. politics:

PELLEY: President Bush has pledged that you will not be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon and will use military force if necessary.

AHMADEINEJAD: I think Mr. Bush, if he wants his party to win the next election, there are cheaper ways and ways to go about this. I can very well give him a few ideas so that the people vote for him. He should respect the American people. They should not bug the telephone conversations of their citizens. They should not kill the sons and daughters of the American nation. They should not squander the taxpayers’ money and give them to weapons companies. And also help the people, the victims of Katrina. People will vote for them if they do these things. But if they insist on what they are saying right now, this will not help them. Again, nobody can hurt the Iranian people. And history tells us that the people who have been less than kind to the Iranian people, they have lost out. What I’m saying, I am being very sincere here. I’m a Muslim. I cannot tell a lie. I am supposed to tell the truth. What I’m saying is that President Bush’s conduct in Iraq is wrong. And his wrong conduct is behind his party losing the previous elections. This is very clear. The American people are very much dismayed with the behavior and the conduct of the present administration. They are not dismayed with Iran. In fact, the two nations are very close to one another. An example of that would be the letter sent to me by an American scholar a few days ago.

PELLEY: You mentioned telling the truth as a Muslim, and as you know so much better than I do, Verse 42 of the second sura: “The truth shall not be obscured by falsehood, and those who know the truth must tell it.” But when I ask you a question as direct as “Will you pledge not to test a nuclear weapon?” you you dance all around the question. You never say “yes.” You never say “no.”

Note that Pelley’s last claim there is a blatant lie. Ahmadinejad clearly said several times in this very interview that Iran has no plan to build and test a nuclear weapon. He clearly said several times that Iran is not supplying weapons to fighters in Iraq. Well, I suppose Pelley is correct that Ahmadinejad never says simply “yes” or “no,” because Pelley badgers him constantly to answer his accusations with a simple “yes” or “no” and Ahmadinejad ignores these requests except to complain that Pelley keeps interrupting him. In fact, I suppose Pelley isn’t lying at all: being an American journalist, he’s not familiar with politicians who are capable of sustaining a coherent train of thought for more than one and a half sentences. He’s probably no longer capable of paying attention to any statement longer than a sound bite.

At any rate, it’s like Pelley planned out the whole interview beforehand, including all of Ahmadinejad’s answers, and the interview that occurs in reality is like a bad improv show, with Pelley playing the asshole who constantly negates the other actors. Oh, I forgot to quote the part about Israel and Palestine, but it’s a good part too. Pelley asks him five times in a row whether he would recognize Israel if they reach a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and Ahmadinejad keeps trying to explain that he just wants the Palestinian people to have a say and it’s not up to him whether they decide on a two-state solution or whatever. Five times in a fucking row. Pelley acts like its unreasonable of Ahmadinejad not to pontificate on how the Palestinian people ought to govern themselves — but again, I suppose he just doesn’t know what to do with a politician who doesn’t what to play Big Brother to the rest of the world.

Ahmadinejad may be a hypocrite about religion and peace, and for all I know he may be lying about Iran’s nonexistent nuclear-weapons program and support for terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere. He’s less impressive in some parts of the interview, as when he dodges a question about the 1979 hostage crisis. But his criticisms of American foreign policy and President Bush are clearly right. And at any rate, as he points out, the United States simply has no moral high ground in these matters from which to accuse Iran. And what Ahmadenijad clearly isn’t is a mouth-frothing Jew-hater terrorist hellbent on blowing up Israel. And what he clearly is is a hell of a lot more thoughtful and intelligent than morons like Pelley, Bush, and everybody else in the American political and media establishment.

Meanwhile, Congress votes overwhelmingly to denounce Iranian president. Democrat Tom Lantos, who proposed the bill, had this to say:

Iran faces a choice between a very big carrot and a very sharp stick. It is my hope that they will take the carrot. But today, we are putting the stick in place.

This is how we in America make peace with the nations of the world: we treat them like horses, give them treats or beat them with big sticks. What’s the “big carrot,” anyway? That we won’t drop cluster bombs on Tehran? And all they have to do is stop doing what they insist they’re already not doing.

By the way, did you know the AP is part of the vast anti-Semitic conspiracy??? Check this out: “It reflected lawmakers’ long-standing nervousness about Tehran’s intentions in the region, particularly toward Israel — a sentiment fueled by the pro-Israeli lobby whose influence reaches across party lines in Congress.”

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Scott Adams:

If Israel had an enemy that it could make peace with, then I might feel different. But it doesn’t, so Israel’s best interests dictate keeping the neighbors too economically weak to purchase expensive weapons, and to control as much territory as possible. I don’t begrudge any country that makes rational decisions in support of its own safety.

Now, obviously, when Israel drops its USA-provided cluster bombs on its neighbors and steals and occupies its neighbors’ land, and imposes sanctions on the occupied people of Gaza and cuts off their fuel and electricity and lets them starve — well, that’s rational, right? What else can they do? The only way for a country to be sure of its safety is to lay waste to its neighbors.

On the other hand, when those nuts in Hamas and Hezbollah fire some rockets at Israel or blow up a bus in Jerusalem? What the fuck are they thinking? They’re powerless. The legitimate use of violence belongs to the powerful. Duh, right? How can you make peace with powerless oppressed people who think they’re allowed to use violence?

That’s right, isn’t it?

No, that is wrong.

I used to ride the bus to school, and once as I was waiting for it to arrive I was accosted by an expert in Middle Eastern politics. I say she was an expert because she knew which folks are Shiite and which are Sunni. That makes more expert than, say, most people in the Bush administration or in Congress. This was last summer, when Israel was making the rational decision to support its own safety by bombing residential neighborhoods and ambulances in Lebanon. In retaliation for Hezbollah firing missiles into Israel which wounded several civilians. So this lady started out just listing every group of people in the Middle East and whether they’re Shiite or Sunni, and which groups hate which other groups, and I just nodded and said, “Uh huh, right,” wondering with dread what her point would be when she finally came to it. And it turned out her point was that the problem with peace in the Middle East, the reason you can’t make peace with these people, is that they’re not afraid to die! Americans and Israelis, being rational, fear death. This puts us at a disadvantage in our ceaseless wars with the hordes of would-be martyr terrorists, which I suppose we make up for with our huge-ass bombs and laser-guided missiles.

They’re all suicidal nuts who want to be martyrs, so we might as well slaughter them all.

The violence of the powerful is right. The violence of the powerless is wrong.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

If you happen to use the Blogroll Autolinker along with BirdFeederWP, you’ll probably notice something bad like this show up in your feeds:

WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'WHERE 1=1 AND link_visible = 'Y' ORDER BY link_name ASC' at line 1]
SELECT * , IF (DATE_ADD(link_updated, INTERVAL 120 MINUTE) >= NOW(), 1,0) as recently_updated FROM WHERE 1=1 AND link_visible = 'Y' ORDER BY link_name ASC

I did, anyway. It turns out it’s because BirdFeederWP needs to reestablish the connection to the WordPress database, and it does so in a way that wipes out all the $wpdb->table_name variables that WordPress uses internally to refer to its database tables. So when the Blogroll Autolinker calls a function to get all your links from the database, it can’t because it doesn’t know what the links table is called! I contacted the author of the plugin about that, and in the meantime I think you can fix the problem by copying the following code into BirdFeederWP.php just after line 113:

$wpdb->prefix = $table_prefix;
if ( preg_match('|[^a-z0-9_]|i', $wpdb->prefix) && !file_exists(ABSPATH . 'wp-content/db.php') )
    wp_die("<strong>ERROR</strong>: <code>$table_prefix</code> in <code>wp-config.php</code> can only contain numbers, letters, and underscores.");
$wpdb->posts          = $wpdb->prefix . 'posts';
$wpdb->users          = $wpdb->prefix . 'users';
$wpdb->categories     = $wpdb->prefix . 'categories';
$wpdb->post2cat       = $wpdb->prefix . 'post2cat';
$wpdb->comments       = $wpdb->prefix . 'comments';
$wpdb->link2cat       = $wpdb->prefix . 'link2cat';
$wpdb->links          = $wpdb->prefix . 'links';
$wpdb->options        = $wpdb->prefix . 'options';
$wpdb->postmeta       = $wpdb->prefix . 'postmeta';
$wpdb->usermeta       = $wpdb->prefix . 'usermeta';
$wpdb->terms          = $wpdb->prefix . 'terms';
$wpdb->term_taxonomy  = $wpdb->prefix . 'term_taxonomy';
$wpdb->term_relationships = $wpdb->prefix . 'term_relationships';
if ( defined('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE') )
    $wpdb->users = CUSTOM_USER_TABLE;
if ( defined('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE') )
    $wpdb->usermeta = CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE;

Then find line 111 and change it so it looks like this:

global $wpdb, $table_prefix;

This worked for me, at least.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

The only difference in this version is that it is compatible with WordPress 2.3 and not compatible with 2.0.

Download now.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Eric Schmitt in The New York Times:

The government’s ability to eavesdrop on potential terrorists helped the United States obtain information that led to the arrests last week of three Islamic militants accused of planning bomb attacks in Germany, the nation’s top spy official said today. This surveillance ability was temporarily restricted earlier this year by a special court, and then restored by Congress last month.

Hey, guys. Come on. These people spent several years lying about all their (formerly) illegal surveillance. Like, I remember how right after the illegal NSA surveillance scandal broke, The Daily Show played all these video clips of Bush talking about how important FISA is and how they always get warrants to spy on terrorists and stuff. Maybe the real news media played those clips too? Ha ha, no, probably not. Anyway, these people like to lie all the time, right? Now they say it’s a good thing they have their (formerly) illegal surveillance programs, since look, they caught some would-be terrorists! I wonder if they might lie about something like that to make it look like their (formerly) illegal surveillance programs are actually useful for catching terrorists. I wonder if this is the sort of thing it might be useful to mention in a news story like this? No, I forgot, journalists have to maintain objectivity, which means they mindlessly parrot official propaganda and you decide! if it’s bullshit.

Oh yeah. And? What the fuck does sharing intelligence about Central Asian terrorist groups operating in Germany have to do with the government’s formerly illegal surveillance of American citizens? I think we ought to stop all our spying and shut down our intelligence agencies and stop starting bullshit wars and stuff that make gathering and sharing intelligence necessary, but last I checked not many other folks were seriously trying to restrict the government’s ability to spy except on American citizens. Right? Nobody is seriously trying to restrict the government’s ability to surveil Central Asian terrorist groups operating in Germany and share that surveillance with Germany. Right? I wonder if that’s the sort of thing it might be useful to mention in a news story like this.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

The Bourne Ultimatum — Paul Greengrass, Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi

I can’t remember Jason Bourne’s real name. Something Webb… ah, David Webb. The filmmakers seem to think it’s important that Bourne learns and remembers this, but the revelations at the end of the movie feel rushed and unsatisfying. Maybe that’s on purpose, though. If you spent three movies trying to discover who you really are and you finally discover that you’re a psycho who volunteered to be one of these sad brainwashed CIA assassins, you’d probably be more disappointed and depressed than enlightened. That’s just how Bourne seems at the end, disappointed and depressed and weary. When he’s finally caught by another “asset” and about to be killed, he sighs and says, “Look what they make you give.” This part of the movie is very good.

The rest of it, not so much. In fact, a lot of the rest of the movie is a lame, disappointing cop-out. It didn’t have to be. Look at Shooter: that’s a brutal, cynical, pessimistic movie with just about the most cynical and pessimistic ending it could have. And it fakes you out twice with the expected reassuring heroic ending before it punches you in the gut. It’s honest. Movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, with their reassuring finales in which the heroes reveal the big bad government conspiracy to the world and the government bad apples are defeated and the world is saved for freedom or whatever, are dishonest, or unforgivably naïve.

I wanted The Bourne Ultimatum to be honest in the end. The Bourne Identity was, but I suppose I knew it wouldn’t end well as soon as Pam Landy showed up in The Bourne Supremacy. I don’t know what her position in the CIA is — she has person one-on-one meetings with the director of the entire CIA, so she’s obviously a high-ranking officer or whatever. How did she get so high in the CIA hierarchy when she’s so dumb? I realize the filmmakers don’t think she is dumb. When they make her say toward the end of this movie that brainwashing and training super-assassins to murder for the State — even murder U.S. citizens! — is “not us,” not the CIA, not the United States, they think they have made her say something true. No, my friends, that shit is what the CIA other agencies of the United States do even in real life, except in real life it involves fewer sexy super-assassins played by Matt Damon. A little later in the movie, after Landy has faxed the secret scandalous CIA documents about the super-assassin program to somebody (we never learn who), she smirks at the main CIA bad guy and tells him he’d better start looking for a good lawyer. Yeah, like he doesn’t already have a great lawyer. This bad guy is even more powerful in the CIA than Landy — oh, his name is all over a secret scandalous document about CIA super-assassins? Oh, that document is a forgery invented by terrorists, and the CIA only uses its super-assassins to kill terrorists and other evil-doers who hate freedom. If the CIA even has super-assassins, which we can’t tell you because of national security. Also, did you know that Pam Landy is a French transvestite lesbian who immigrated illegally from Mexico and wears a burkha and is plotting to blow up and eat American children? Seriously. Come one, Landy, haven’t you heard of Valerie Plame?

Pam Landy is the only official or agent of the U.S. government in the Bourne movies who isn’t directly involved in some way in the super-assassin program. A couple other people from the CIA eventually decide they feel bad about it and try to help Bourne and Landy shut down the program and bring the bad guys to justice, but for the most part everybody in the movies who works for the CIA is either an irredeemably evil villain or a nonentity who sits in front of a computer all day spying on everybody in the universe and thinking nothing of it. Not even bleeding heart Pam Landy seems to have a problem with the fantastic and blatantly illegal (well, formerly blatantly illegal) surveillance technologies employed by the CIA.

And yet the filmmakers think they ought to end the trilogy by reassuring us that if we just get rid of the few bad apples then the good apples like Pam Landy can get back to protecting freedom and democracy and liberty. I suppose the joke is on me for taking these movies seriously. It was clear from the reactions of the audience when I saw the movie that most of them were in it solely for the thrill of watching Matt Damon kill people like a bad-ass.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

A free-speech zone at the 2004 Democratic National Convention

Rudolph Giuliani wrote: “At the core of all Americans is the belief that all human beings have certain inalienable rights that proceed from God but must be protected by the state.”

Protected from what? From whom? Who violates the rights of a group of people? Another group of people, some villainous gang. How? By abusing some power they hold over the first group? Where do they get that power? Why, most often from the state. Will the state protect our rights from itself? Will it police itself to ensure nobody abuses its authority for evil purposes? How often do you find a state genuinely dedicated to protecting the rights of all its citizens? Rarely, if ever.

The state can’t grant or take away inalienable rights, though. You may be prevented from exercising your inalienable rights, but you still have them. The United States Constitution recognizes but doesn’t grant certain inalienable rights. It doesn’t have to recognize them. It can be amended, after all—the Bill of Rights itself is a set of amendments. Not that Congress will ever repeal the amendments in the Bill of Rights. They’ll equivocate them to death. You have the right to bear arms, except for big scary ones. As if the purpose of the second amendment was to protect our right to go hunting and target-shooting and defend ourselves against individual criminals. It’s for our own good, to protect us from criminals who want to kill us. (Meanwhile, the state continues to build an arsenal of weapons that could easily destroy human civilization.) You have the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure of your property, and agents of the state who wish to search or seize your property must obtain a warrant giving probable cause and describing the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized. That is, unless it’s inconvenient for the state to obtain a warrant, or there’s a terrorist suspect involved. It’s for our own good, to protect us from terrorists. You have the right to peaceably assemble, but if you peaceably assemble to protest the state you had better stay in the free speech zone if you don’t want to get beaten by the police. You have the right to freedom of speech, but if you say “fuck” on television a million dollars. You have the right to freedom of the press, but if you publish “obscene” material you might be fined or thrown in prison. It’s for our own good, to protect the children, who are our future.

The most important right, the right to control your own body, isn’t explicit in the Constitution at all, although it’s obviously implicit in the rights enumerated. It’s a right that the state doesn’t protect well at all and often actively violates.

All for our own good. Don’t you enjoy the state’s protection? Isn’t protection from crime and terrorism and moral corruption more important than protection of your rights?

Our inalienable rights must be protected by the state? But the state most often and most effectively prevents their free exercise.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Steve Jobs recently told a little anecdote about former Apple CEO Gil Amelio to explain Apple’s problems in the years after Jobs was fired and before he returned. Amelio supposedly used to say: “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom leaking water and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.”

I think of that quote when I see somebody explain that what we need right now is more and better Democrats. Why do we need more Democrats in particular, I wonder? I myself would be happy with more and better Republicans, Libertarians or even Green Partiers. I don’t care what party you belong to as long as you don’t bomb Iran or torture people or spy on us.

Who cares who we vote for in the next elections, anyway? What is it about watching elected officials get away with desecrating the Constitution that makes you think we can solve that problem by shuffling the electoral deck chairs a little more? After years of Democratic huffing and puffing about hearings and investigations of Bush’s blatantly illegal un-Constitutional conspiracy to spy on everybody in the universe, Congress just legalized the whole thing. What did the Democrats do about that? Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi whined about Republicans. As if the Senate Majority Leader and the House Speaker are powerless. As if the Republicans minority in both houses of Congress somehow managed to pass a bill without any help from Democrats. That shit is just not supposed to happen. Congress should not pass obviously illegal laws. If they do, the President should be there to veto them. If he doesn’t do that, the Judiciary should be there to overturn them. I suppose there’s still an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule against this new law. Ha ha.

How many elected officials in our federal government do you suppose know which branch of the government has the Constitutional power to declare war? How many would admit to knowing?

Our prisons are crowded with people whose only crime was to inhale or ingest or inject certain substances into their bodies. You aren’t legally allowed to do what you want with your own body.

A man was recently sentenced to four years for counterfeiting Microsoft Windows. The protection Microsoft’s intellectual property is more important to the government than four years of a person’s life.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

This shit is not supposed to happen. Evil people should not be able to seize the power of the state and turn from noble to evil ends. A system of government that can’t prevent that is not a viable system of government. Electing government officials who aren’t evil only delays the inevitable.

Is there any viable form of government, then? What government conceived by humans has ever prevented authoritarians and fascists and dictators and emperors from seizing the power of the state and grinding the rest of us to gristle beneath it? Not one of them has ever done so. Most of them have been intended to do the opposite, and on rare occasions when we come up with a form of government that isn’t deliberately evil we never manage to keep it going for more than a few centuries. There’s no hope. Unless….

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Nobody has ever produced any reliable evidence that there is a population of large bipedal hominids other than humans living in western North America, and not for lack of trying. As far as I know, the best evidence is the famous blurry film of what may or may not be a human wearing a gorilla suit:

Now it seems to me that if sasquatches did exist, we should have found some evidence by now. Right? People have been all over the region where sasquatches are supposed to live, and they haven’t seen any. People have spent god only knows how much time deliberately searching for evidence of sasquatches, and they haven’t found any. Maybe we haven’t found any evidence because the things are especially stealthy, or maybe they can turn invisible, but a more plausible explanation is that they don’t exist. I wouldn’t say I believe sasquatches don’t exist, because it’s not about my belief. It’s just a fact that Sasquatches don’t exist.

On the other hand, extraterrestrial life. If life on other planets did exist, should we expect to find evidence? Well, if some tiny one-celled organisms evolved on some other planet than Earth, how could we find out? Well, we couldn’t, could we? Unless we sent a probe to the right planet with equipment to detect such organisms, and it happened to land near enough to detect them. But practically, any evidence of life on other planets is inaccessible to us. Does that mean we should remain agnostic about life on other planets? Well, for myself, I wouldn’t say that I believe extraterrestrial life does not exist, because of course I can’t know that. I would say that I do not believe that extraterrestrial life does exist. I neither believe nor disbelieve. (Of course, if I had sufficient evidence in the existence of extraterrestrial life, I still wouldn’t say I believe in it: I would say it’s a fact.) If you want to call that agnosticism then I guess you’d call me an agnostic.

A lot of people have trouble distinguishing between disbelief and lack of belief, and between believing something and understanding it’s a fact. I don’t believe in evolution, but I understand evolution is a fact. I don’t disbelieve that god exists, but I don’t believe that god exists. And if I had sufficient evidence of god’s existence, then I would say that god’s existence is a fact, not that I believe in god.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Blogroll Autolinker has a new home at WordPress.org. There’s no new version, so you don’t need to download it again if you’re already using it.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

I went to world-famous Newport on the Levee tonight to see a movie, Shooter (which I’ll write about later). After the movie, I wandered around taking photos. Somebody asked me to take a photo of her in front of the Purple People Mover (a purple footbridge across the Ohio River). She’s visiting from Chicago and wants a picture of her in front of this bridge for some reason. So I take the picture and then send it to her, sure. I ask for her email address—oh, she doesn’t have an email address! I guess some people are old school like that. She might know somebody who has an email address, so if she can get somebody to email me then I can send the photos to that person. Otherwise, I’ll have to print them out and mail them by meatspace mail. I don’t mind paying to mail physical copies, but it’d certainly be simpler to email them. But I can order prints to be mailed to this person through Flickr, so yay.

Uh, that’s all. I just thought it was weird to meet somebody who doesn’t have an email address.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

TMNT
Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Kevin Munroe

Just TMNT now, not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Too bad. I haven’t seen any of the other movies in more than fifteen years, but I had no trouble following the plot. If you know the title, you’ve got the prerequisite backstory knowledge. I though maybe they’d follow the current superhero movie trend of remaking, reimagining, rebooting the story, but no, it’s just another story. That’s good. The origin story is usually the least interesting story about superheroes. As for the story itself, it’s all right. Leonardo and Raphael get some character development: Leo starts out reluctant to lead the team but learns to trust himself, Raph starts out angry and resentful and wanting to be a lone wolf but learns that teamwork is better. I think they must have gone through these same character arcs dozens of times in previous incarnations. Well, I suppose there’s not much else you can do with the characters without losing their pure, simplistic cores. This is just another movie, not a secret message to people who’ve spent their lives absorbing turtle continuity. This is good: not a boring reboot, not an esoteric secret message.

Michelangelo and Donatello don’t get much to do. April O’Neil gets to jumpstart the plot, and Casey Jones gets to be her boyfriend and give her something to worry about when he goes out superheroing. And April is a ninja now too, so she isn’t just the worrying girlfriend, she gets in on some of the fights. April and Casey are cohabiting. I suppose that’ll upset some parents of young children.

The best thing about the new movie is the animation. This was a great idea. I couldn’t find any samples from action scenes, but check out samples anyway:

Now here’s the new look:

Guys in rubber suits suck. The animated turtles look a lot more realistic, despite being more cartoony. The animation is impressive. There’s a scene in the middle of the movie with Leonardo and Raphael fighting on a rooftop in the rain, and it’s amazing to see the closeups of raindrops splashing on the turtles’ skin. In a few years it’ll look primitive, but for now it’s the closest to photorealistic I’ve seen. And objects look like they really have mass.

Originally published at λογοποιέω. Please leave any comments there.

If you’re not already reading Arthur Silber’s blog Once Upon a Time…, you ought to start. You especially ought to read his series “Dispatch from Germany, Summer of 1939″ (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and especially the third part on building an effective resistance to the impending war with Iran.

We cannot choose the moment in history during which we happen to spend our lives. But we can choose what we do about it, and how we try to affect the course of events, to the extent we can. We are living during an especially critical time, one that is filled with terrible dangers — and one that might change the world and our country for the rest of our lives. We may not have chosen this battle, but it is here whether we want it or not. So I hope some of you will choose to join it, on the side of peace, liberty and the infinitely precious value of a single human life.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

If you come in the front, you’ll have notice that the front of stevenberg.net is no longer this blog, and that this blog is now called λογοποιέω . Why? Well, I’m just trying out different stuff. I’m also trying out tumblelogging at κυβιστάω. I post links, quotes, photos and videos there several times a day, and I add bookmarks to del.icio.us all the time (but they’re mirrored onto my tumblelog so you don’t have to check them separately), and I upload photos to Flickr whenever I take them, but I’ll probably continue to post here infrequently. This blog will be for more substantial writings, while the ephemera of my online life will go the other places.

Ah, and one other change: yeah, Rose and I are splitting up. Well, splitting up our marriage but hopefully not our entire relationship. We’ll see We’ve been good friends for a long time but we turned out to be very bad spouses. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Update: So I finally installed Internet Explorer 6 (yay for IEs4Linux), and I see the formatting in the tumblelog is sort of messed up in IE. I knew it would be, but I didn’t even care! Oh well, I’ll fix it later.

(And the Greek letters don’t show up right in IE, but whatever!)

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Or maybe I can do this. Who the fuck ever knows?

Stranger Than Fiction. I was going to write this whole post about it and why I love it, but it turned into a really bad post that I don’t want to write and so instead I’m going to just post two bits from it that will hopefully not be totally nonsensical.

First: When I first saw the movie, I was really happy that Harold lived at the end, but now I almost wish he hadn’t. I was going to say I have a different reason for wanting him to die than Kay Eiffel does, but maybe that’s not true. Why does she kill all her protagonists? Professor Jules Hilbert thinks it’s because she’s brilliant and it’s just how her books have to end, although he never cares to explain to us why. But I suspect he’s a fraud for reasons I can’t remember right now, and anyway it’s sort of jerky to say some guy has to die just because someone wrote a good story about him dying. The real reason she kills her protagonists is that she doesn’t want to be alive and yet doesn’t want to kill herself, so she dies vicariously through her characters. Right?

Second: Even though he lives apparently happily ever after, it’s still a sad ending for me because I’ve lived his life… not literally, obviously, but the part where I have Asperger’s Syndrome and shuffle through a fairly empty life with no real close friends, until suddenly one day I meet someone who gets through all my autistic-spectrum weirdness and obsessions and rituals and causes me to do painfully earnest things like buy her flours (hee hee) and say painfully earnest things that I don’t even really understand and yet know I have to say. I can’t really explain this, but if you’ve seen the movie then you know what I’m talking about. Harold and Ana get a happy ending, which is one really nice perk of being characters in a made-up story, because out here in reality you have to keep going after the happy ending to the part where you find out that being higher on the autistic spectrum than most people is a bad idea if you want to sustain a long-term relationship. Oh well.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

But I can’t do this right now. Maybe later.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

Bush:

I’m like a lot of Americans that say, “Well, if [the fake WMD intelligence] wasn’t right in Iraq, how do you know it’s right in Iran.”

Bush is always good for a chuckle.

Originally published at stevenberg.net. Please leave any comments there.

On Wednesday, Rice and the public relations chief for the Bush administration, Karen Hughes, held a “Private Sector Summit on Public Diplomacy.” Sponsored by the State Department and the Public Relations Coalition, the summit was held with 150 top public relations professionals and State Department officials “to identify clear action steps the private sector can take to support U.S. public diplomacy.”

In other words, the U.S. is asking for help from PR pros in creating a shiny, happy new image for itself. America is currently in the doghouse, globally, due in large part to post-Sept. 11 actions like the invasion of Iraq. Put simply, the United States isn’t part of the popular crowd these days.

…

Edelman said that the United States’ sagging image abroad is actually hurting iconic American brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, a change that was first noticed a few years ago. So this country is doing the right thing by looking at how it can improve its standing across the globe.

We certainly wouldn’t want McDonald’s to suffer because some stupid foreigners are upset about those fucking hundreds of thousands of Iraqis we murdered.