Waterboarding

My one thought about waterboarding is... we could win the battle and yet lose the war... in the past we made friends out of enemies because of how well we treated them in captivity... POWs became I-94s...
... Japanese soldiers fed on the fear of American treatment in captivity and would die before being captured... when this stigma was changed our enemies were changed...
... and How many Americans did you see defecting over to Russia in the Cold War?...
... Our culture won a war... while the military at best stalemated it's way through Korea and Vietnam... it was freedom... and the power of a semi-free market (which is the biggest part of the culture according to Karl Marx)...
... these terrorists were raised on one form of education... a very strict and very violent translation of the Koran... and that's all they know... Similarly, (as far as I know), people in the Middle-East have a very structured and controlled... very negative view of America...
... How are we going to change their minds if they only see us at our worst?...

... Now the argument is made that we don't have time to win this way because attacks are imminent...

... And the argument can be made that everything is different when you throw religion into the mix?...

... And you're probably right on both counts... to a degree... but why are we so stuck on trashing ourselves that we have to go all the way back to something in 2003 to ferret out more negativity?... How is anyone going to want to be a part of Western culture when we hate ourselves?... Why since I've been in the States have I not heard anything positive about anything?... What happened to this one great nation so confident in it's own goodness?... It's there if people would just trouble to look for it... Or have things really slipped so bad that forget about keeping things right... skipping right to the end of Carl Schultz' quote... and 'When wrong, to put it right'...

The Film Indu$try

My one attempt at €ulture through 4 years of €ollege was a film €ourse who's only relevance to me at present is that I am unable to enjoy every movie I go to see... I've always taken pride in this (believed) holier-than-thou perspective on the movie busine$$... lately, however, I've realized the actual reason I hate every movie in the past 5 years is simply because they really are that bad... I'm not a special butterfly of film criticism... I'm a carbon cutout regular Joe movie-goer... In some twisted producer's mind 'special effects' are seen as the rock to the 'any semblance of a decent plot or storyline's' scissors... and the trifecta paper of this pitiful combination should be 'theater goers with a semblance of self-respect willing to stay home and put up with a made for TV Kirk Cameron movie rather than choke on the next dull-as-bone tossed at their feet by the studios'... This has not happened yet...
... The last 5 movies I've seen...
... As a comedy Stop Brothers is supposed to be stupid and can thus get away with anything...

... In Transformers they tried to airlift the Cube out on a chopper forgetting that 3 of the bad guys could fly and none of the good ones could...

... In Pride and Glory a handshake is supposed to make corruption, a day of riots, and a cop-killing go away forever for everyone...

...The glory of The Lord of the Rings books was the story was only a small part of a much larger war going on all over the continent. Yet in the movie they had to have everything on the screen with nothing else going on outside of it. They even showed the Eye of Sauron. Film 101: Some things are better left to the imagination... IE: The books created a much more powerful fear of being watched when you didn't see or know where Sauron was... But most importantly, as pointed out by another, if the eagles are going to come to SAVE Frodo and Sam at the volcano, why couldn't they have just flown and dumped the ring in the lava in the first place?...

... And yesterday... The Matrix: Reloaded... And in it's defense the one thing it does have going for it is it makes you think... With The Question... 'What i$ €ontrol?'... interesting... a little... provocative... slightly... handled many different ways from many different perspectives... (there's something about a euro-centric colonialist snobbish french-accented d-bag to really drive home the point)... a glimmer of hope... but the only interesting part... and beaten to death...
... This movie loses me when the simple obvious solution is somehow overlooked for the sake of footage most likely already shot and too valuable to be scrapped... it's like they plan the movie around a few really good action scenes and then do whatever they can to get from fight 1 to chase 2 to fight 3... It's what happens when you try to magic upon a sequel of a spectacularly good first movie in mere days... see also: Pirates of the Carribean... In this case where it loses me is... if The Matrix has all sorts of glitches that are running wild causing all sorts of damage... well... simple... give all the humans ambien for 10 minutes... reboot the system... and problem solved... I know it works because I do this every day on my laptop on account of I use windows... and if you must keep Zion around... then kill everyone minus 5 males and 18 females... and then go back to business as usual...
...I'm not this sadistic someone cheering for the bad guys in every movie... but if the director is such an idiot as to set the rules of the movie to where the bad guy... acting exactly how they would... should win... then so be it... gone are the days when 50 machine gun weilding bad guys all somehow miss the good-guy running under no cover less than 10 feet away... we learned this in the last awful Rambo movie... gone are the days when the bad guy's nervous breakdown at the most pivitol moment saves the win for the good guy... I don't care how many people liked Reservoir Dogs... and gone are the days when I will trust a teaser trailer to guarantee me a good movie... I'm even wary of the new X-men because the last 2 were so bad.

Half Asleep and Wake up and...

... however many thousands of feet I was over Myrtle Beach flying over it made me unable to realize just how bad things were on the ground... Distance always makes things seem better than they really are... or were... so the little brush-fire that I assumed was no more than South Carolina's version of burning crops was actually a front-line news story huge forest fire that has taken down over 40 homes... but yet to put a serious dynt in the tourist industry.

Pride and Glory

I think when they made Pride and Glory they were probably thinking of how long it had been since the last really good cop movie... LA Confidential so long forgotten it isn't even on the shelf at Blockbuster says my last trip down the aisle... Lethal Weapon 1, 2 and 3 not really good cop movies... and Training Day unable to make the jump from pop-culture Star Wars 1, 2, or 3 short-term memory to epic Star Wars 4, 5, and 6 long-term memory... and so, FTW, all they had to do was mix all the plots from every old cop movie together... bring in 2 fairly well-known prototypical man characters... if we're lucky add on one, up to two, new twists... package... and sell it again to movie-goers who trust the fact that Edward Norton makes really good movies and Colin Farrel has made at least one good movie... this system is similar to music producers who take older songs, find new good-looking singers, change the beat, and somehow surprisingly pass it off as something new to an unsuspecting teenie-bopper generation... which in turn becomes the only good song on a complete garbage platinum selling CD... but the problem this time was, I bet, they signed off on the movie before 'The Departed' came out... too late to drop the movie... but, in effect, the time between trust issues, dirty cops, protecting your own, and the grey issues of crime fighting were less than one year old and incredibly tired...

Small Town Livin

The most exciting time for any small town is the weekend of the fair. Every town has one... and along with it every town also has... a) a craft show... b) a bull-riding machine that costs $5 to ride... c) a softball tournament... d) a tractor pull... e) catfish wrestling... f) a band that is local enough to feel local yet out of county enough to seem famous... g) some distant relative in the crowd that hasn't "seen you since you were this tall"... "what, your married!"... "where y'all livin' now"... "out of town, really!? Girl you crazy gallavantin' all over the world like that"... "I was expectin' you'd say somethin' like Sumter or Greeleyville"... "I wish I could say somethin' like that"... "Y'all stop over and see us sometime y'here!"

A New Life Lesson from a Dog

This same scared little dog is currently curled up under my feet chewing on a clothes hanger... in a fairly well-known story a reporter asked Stalin how the people could love him after all the evil he had committed against them over the years... He answered by picking up a chicken, held it tight, and proceeded to pluck every feather one by one from the bird... while it struggled to get away through it all, the second he was done he offered the bird some food... and suddenly this tiny bird, close to starvation, forgot everything else and fed right from the man's hand... and this bird, shivering from cold, nuzzled up in this same man's arms for warmth... Now I am not Stalin... I'm not a sadist... the only similarity between us in the story is the point I'm trying to make... They say that the way to a man's heart is through his stomache... and I say the way to a dog's heart is through a treat...

A life lesson from a dog

... 'The world is a mirror that reflects back every thought, every word, and every action you send out into it'... Our amazing house guests have a new puppy dog... they brought to the vet for some shots and to get his claws clipped... the fear of the new doctor and the pain of the whole thing has turned this little dog into a little fluffy ball of fear... and in it's twisted view of the world it sees everyone as enemies... the worst part is the way it acts towards everyone by barking, running and hiding, and trying to bite them when they come close ends up making this illusion true... it's an unbeatable defense mechanism that I see no way of breaking through...