Monthly Archives: May 2011

Thor–my review of the movie

Movies

Thor movie stills-3

I’ll admit it. I went into this movie not expecting a lot of great things, but having always been a Kenneth Branaugh fan, I figured it couldn’t be that bad. And as a Shakespearean fan, I figured a touch of the bard into a superhero movie couldn’t be bad either.

First off, it wasn’t bad. It was cute, and it was one of those movies that does what it’s supposed to do. And that’s really about it.

Okay, that’s not about it. I did have a few more things to say. Like, for one, why can’t they just make a movie once that takes us right into the middle of the franchise, instead of having us have to go with the whole backstory thing, as if we’re too stupid to figure it out ourselves. As a result, we end up with one movie after another that is essentially retelling Superman the Movie, except by inserting another superhero into the role. We got this with Batman (twice), Iron Man, Spiderman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the XMen (twice, or at least restarted again), Jonah Hex (or at least what should have been a properly done movie, but what can you expect when you put Megan Fox in a movie where it’s not porn?), Daredevil, Electra, and practically every other superhero movie that has tried to retell the same story that we already all know very well.

And that’s the problem. We all know the story. We know how the hero got to be what he or she is. It would be kind of nice to just start off in the middle of a franchise and see what happens.

And that’s what we got with Watchmen, and strangely enough, I kind of thought that was what we were going to be getting with Thor. I mean, think about it. We weren’t going to go back and do the birth of Thor, but we were going to see a series that took place about a Norse god that was already established. Turns out I was wrong, as we even got bits and pieces of him as a kid with his brother Loki growing up.

The movie did what it had to do, and that’s keep us entertained. It had the big crescendo moment where the hero becomes his big bad self, and then he takes out the bad guy. The problem, however, was that most of the action that shows up on the screen is kind of the fault of the hero himself. I mean, the movie starts because (spoiler alert!) Thor’s brother Loki manufactures a plan to get the frost giants, or whatever they were, to start up a war that’s been under a cease fire for centuries. But the war doesn’t really get going until Thor decides he needs to be the bad ass that he is and takes his buddies to frozen world to pick a fight with the frost giants. This leads to both Thor’s banishment, and the eventual war between the frost giants and the Norse gods. I hate when that happens. So, in the end, when Thor gets his powers back, he basically beats some monster that has been sent to Earth to kill Thor, saving everyone. And then goes back to Valhalla to save Valhalla from the gods who are angry at Valhalla because of something Thor did before he was banished. In other words, while Loki kind of started it all, Thor is equally responsible for the war, and in the end, he kind of fixes what he broke by destroying the enemies of Odin, people who became their enemies because Thor wanted to look cool. In other words, it was a lot about nothing. A lot of speeches get made, and a lot of posturing gets postured, and in the end, we’re left with the Norse gods not able to get back to America because they had to destroy the bridge to save the world. Kind of confusing, but yeah, Norse mythology can be that way. At least it didn’t end with any ABBA songs.

I did have to add as an aside that Dr Pepper is doing an interesting tie-in with Thor, where they advertise the Warriors III, the three warriors who serve alongside Thor. Only, in the movie, there are four of them. The Dr Pepper ad conveniently dropped the girl of the four members, which makes me wonder if she was added at the last minute, or Dr Pepper just hates women. I’m curious to know. Either way, she was the hottest of the four (being a guy myself, one can understand why I might say that), but she was also the toughest of the group. One seemed like he was trying to be Jet Li, one a human variation of Chewbacca, and the other guy some kind of pansy who fights with a sword. One of the secret service guys who points out the girl made the best attribution when he called her Xena. Couldn’t have said it any better. But she was too demonstrative of a character for Dr Pepper to have left her out of the campaign. It wasn’t a Warriors III thing as there were most definitely IV.

As I drove home from the theater, I reflected on the movie, and one thing seemed to sum up my experience: I forgot my umbrella at the theater, meaning that when it rained next, I would be without protection, much like Earth will be now that Thor destroyed the bridge that lets him come back, something significant because he’s supposed to return when the Avengers come out as a movie in a few years. So, let’s hope they have a Corps of Engineers in Valhalla building a new earthly bridge. Until then, I’ll buy a new umbrella and hope it doesn’t rain.

Make Coupons Optional Plz!

Business, Economics, Technology, , , , , , , ,

I shop at Meijer’s stores for groceries. I really like it. It’s one of those grocery stores that have pretty much everything you need, and I’ve been happy with it. Unlike most supermarkets in California, this one actually sells everything. And I’ve learned to like it.

What I haven’t learned to like is how they want to force coupons on me. I’m not a coupon kind of person. I just don’t like cutting them out and bringing them in. I’ve also come to the conclusion that coupons force people into buying products they wouldn’t normally buy anyway. I might buy a package of Charmin, but just because I have a coupon for it doesn’t mean I really want to go shopping for it. If it was convenient, I might think about it, but cutting out coupons, storing them for future use and remembering to bring the right one just seems like a waste of time. Sure, you save money, but sometimes convenience of peace of mind is much more economical than actual cost savings.

But I can’t get Meijer to stop handing me a handful of stupid coupons that I don’t want. And they’re rarely for anything I’ll ever buy anyway. They’re always for things that are kind of like the thing I bought, but not exactly it. In other words, they’re trying to intice me into buying things I don’t normally buy. And I don’t play that way.

So, I’m stuck leaving Meijer each time I shop with a handful of useless coupons that I then feel guilty for having to throw into the trash can. And I don’t do it immediately because they wrapped those coupons around my final receipt, so that receipt goes into my pocket, and then a few days later, it gets pulled out with a gob of useless coupons that end up on my counter, and they accumulate because they join the other coupons I’ll never use. Basically, Meijer is contributing to more and more trash that I end up having to throw out of my house, adding to landfills in a way that wouldn’t have been necessary if they would just give me an option at the beginning that says: “Paper or plastic and coupons or no coupons.”

Simple as that. And we’d all be happy.

I’m just saying.

Why Hire Reporters? Just Have Your Staff Rewrite Someone Else’s Story.

Business, News, Writing, , , , , , ,

An interesting story has been going around the news waves lately. According to the Guardian, Chinese prisoners are being forced to play World of Warcraft and farm gold to sell to players of the game. If you play this game, or one like it, this is an all too common story, and it’s often been on the periphery of the game. Lots of lazy players tend to want to take the easy road by using real world money to buy the work it would take them to actually play through a lot of the drudgery of the game itself. However, it’s not the gold selling story that I want to focus on, but on the telling of the story itself.

The original article appeared in the British news site paper, The Guardian, and it can be found here. However, when I first read the story, it was reposted on a World of Warcraft official forum, after having been reposted from an article that appeared on Mashable, which appears here. The first article was written by Danny Vincent, in Beijing, for The Guardian. The Mashable article was written by Lauren Idvik. In Idvick’s article, she essentially paraphrased the original article, quoted actual quotes from the actual article, and acted like it was a brand new story. As I read this second article, all I kept thinking to myself was: What purpose did rewriting someone’s article actually do? There’s one piece of “new” information offered in the newer article, and that’s a borrow from the New York Times, in which the author paraphrases that $2 billion of virtual currency was traded in 2008.

This is a common problem that has started to occur with blogs. Rather than actual articles, we’re receiving a lot of rephrased articles from bloggers who are paraphrasing articles actually published from more legitimate sources, kind of like a Twitter of news articles with the attribution (mostly) but a fantasy put forth that the new article is actually offering new insight. In the beginning, this wasn’t that bad because most of the time, bloggers were offering new information, or commentary that supplemented the original article itself, but now, like this one article, the rephrasing of the article doesn’t actually offer anything new, but rehashes the exact same story and puts someone else’s byline on it.

Having been alerted to this phenomenon, I started looking at this same story, following the Google links to see where else they might bring me. Digital Trends has an article by Andrew Couts, who uses the same information from the Guardian article AND includes the $2 billion piece of information but gives no attribution to where that information occurred (missing the fact that Idvick’s article at least attributed to the New York Times). Couts’s article has a one paragraph introduction to the concept, but after that almost all of the information is rephrased from the original Guardian article.

Techspot‘s Matthew DeCarlo uses the same article from the Guardian as well, and when he then uses the $2 billion figure, he indicates the information comes from the China Internet Center, whatever that may be. According to the original New York Times article that seems to be sporadically used by others without attribution, “nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.” That article was actually written by David Barboza on June 30, 2009.

I’m not saying anyone’s actually doing anything dishonest, but at the same time there seems to be a lot of reporting going on based off of previous sources that aren’t getting the credit that they probably deserve. It’s one thing to quote a story, or even to post a story and then comment on it, but what seems to be happening is we’re getting a lot of stories being rewritten for the sake of sounding like they’re brand new and from other sources. There’s not been any actual attempt to hide the original sources, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting a lot of transparency at the same time. A lot of “reporters” seem to be making a career out of reporting other reporter’s stories, and that concerns me.

Now, having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve done something similar in the past, although not to this extreme, but having pointed this out, I will definitely go out of my way to make sure that when I print someone else’s information, I do it because I want to give attention to someone else’s story, not somehow try to act like I’m the original reporter of information I did nothing more than read in another newspaper just like anyone else could have done.

Why is the News Obsessed with Unimportant, Marginalized People?

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ABC News ran a story today warning informing us that Sarah Palin may in fact be running for president. As a news junkie, my immediate thought wasn’t (to the shock of many) “wow” or “isn’t that interesting” but “who cares?” I mean, honestly, this is such a non-story that the level of ridiculousness borders of a word that would have to be more ridiculous than “ridiculous”. Maybe super-ridiculous. Let’s be honest for a moment here, kids. Sarah Palin has as much of a chance being elected president as I do. Yeah, not kidding here. I have as much chance of being elected president as Sarah Palin does. The only way she would ever be elected president is if 70 percent of the country had a lobotomy the day before the election, which is exactly, not surprisingly, the requirements it would take for the American population to write me in as a write-in candidate in all fifty states, garnering me enough electoral votes to finally call Starving Students to move my furniture into the White House. Then again, with a $400,000 a year salary, I’d probably just leave all my stuff in place and buy all new shit, because I’d definitely be living a completely different life. I’d keep my stuffed animals, and maybe my Playstation 3 (because it gets my streaming Netflix movies, and you know I’d be wanting Netflix in the White House). But the rest of it can go to Good Will, or Good Will Hunting, or wherever it is that you send things when you finally get elected president by a write-in vote because the country has decided it doesn’t want Sarah Palin in the White House.

But I’m starting to digress here. What I really wanted to talk about was Taylor Swift and her new album. Oh wait, that’s not what I wanted to talk about, although I will admit it’s a great album, and I really have enjoyed continuously playing it in my car each and every time I get into it. No, what I wanted to get back to was the subject of how the news seems obsessed with such unimportant stories.

Take Charlie Sheen for instance. Why has the news spent so much time talking about him? Before his ridiculous melt-down, he was really unimportant, insignificant and compartmentalized to a television show that relegated itself to the importance of appearing next to Big Bang Theory. Seriously. And somehow, because he blew up one day, he’s the next most important thing since, well, I don’t have a comparison because it still doesn’t make any sense. Yet, the news, for weeks, was obsessed with all things Charlie Sheen, and honestly, he wasn’t all that significant before it all happened, and now that it’s finally blowing over, I wonder if they’re not all thinking to themselves, “how exactly did that happen?”

Which is what brings me to the obsession itself. Why do they get so obsessed with such unimportant figures in celebrity? We live in an era where people are becoming famous for being famous, and I just don’t understand it. Kim Kardasian recently announced she’s engaged to be married. Who is this person? Why is she a celebrity? Why do we care? Why is she getting so much attention when she hasn’t done a single significant thing ever. Yeah, I understand she was some kind of reality star, but really, is that enough to substantiate all of the attention? Yeah, she’s a bit attractive, but so are a lot of people. They’re not made into media sensations that require booking agents and sit down sessions with David Letterman.

Why aren’t we hyping people for doing great things? That’s one thing I’ve never understood. If a scientist discovers a property that might change humanity and civilization, that person is important and should be considered seriously significant. But rarely is such a person treated that way by anyone outside of his or her scientific discipline or academic community. Instead, we over-hype really ridiculous characters who perform stupid antics, and then make a media career out of that one moment in time.

Could this be a symptom of our need for a 24 hour news cycle, but the reality is that we don’t have 24 hours worth of news to fill that cycle? Is that the problem here? Are we so obsessed with pretending that we have news that we’ll do anything to sell an unimportant story because we don’t want to admit that on a daily basis, nothing really significant tends to happen? Congress can’t come up with a budget. Is that news? Not really. But the day that they do come up with a budget IS news. Then it should be reported. Instead, because we have no news to report, we’ll focus endlesslessy on gridlock as if that’s a story itself. It’s not. Gridlock means you can’t make a decision, or a consensus of a decision. Try to sell that as a story, and you start to see the problem that we seem to be experiencing in our daily lives. We have nothing to report, so we report unimportant events as “events” and then we hype the hell out of them until the rest of us suddenly feel it’s important.

So, what’s our solution? Stop paying attention. Really. That’s it. Discontinue watching news that hypes stupid shit as actual news. It may mean looking for alernative avenues of news because the old avenues don’t know how to stop hyping crap as news. However, I suspect that most of us are addicted to this crap, so we’re kind of doomed to a continuous process of receiving fake news as news, and our attention will continue to be focused on unimportant people doing unimportant things while the rest of us are told to treat it as important. Mainly because we don’t have any other way of looking at the situation.

The Implications of Politicians Not Understanding What’s Important About the Economy

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Politicians don’t get the economy. Ever. I mean, they might even be economists, but they don’t seem to understand what is significant about the economy. You may wonder what I’m talking about considering the fact that the “economy” has been in the news constantly lately, and it would be very difficult to understand how anyone would miss this type of story. Well, let me explain what’s going on, and perhaps we might start to recognize some very obvious signs that seem to keep getting missed.

First, the average American doesn’t care one iota about the deficit. Oh, they care, but they don’t really care. It’s like when a guy tells his girlfriend he loves her. He’s the politician in this equation. He probably truly loves her. Now, when a woman tells a guy she loves him, she might actually mean she LOVES him, as in she would drag herself across the desert over jagged glass for him, or she loves him, which means she tolerates his presence and thinks he’s kind of okay, but there’s no way in the world he’s ever getting to third base with her. Yeah, when making these analogies, I sometimes use really sophomoric examples that I wouldn’t normally use in every day conversation. I don’t think I’ve referred to women, dating and baseball analogies in the same setting ever before in normal conversations.

Anyway, the point is: while our politicians might understand the economy, they don’t understand what’s important about the economy that matters to the average American. Because when it comes down to it, that’s ALL that is going to make a difference during an election. Think about that for a moment. We keep hearing gloom and doom predictions about the economy, especially if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, don’t stop the deficit from getting out of control and don’t fix the sinking ship (or whatever stupid analogy we use at any particular time). The average American is thinking: Do I have a job right now, and do I expect to have a decent one in the very near future? That’s about it. Whether or not the debt ceiling is reached, whether or not the US ever pays off its debts, or whether or not the US is perceived as still being a global, economic superpower, the average American doesn’t care. All he or she cares about is what matters to him or her at any particular time.

Which means the average person doesn’t feel any ties to the deficit of this country at all. Yes, on a surface level, they know that they are part of the mix of people who have to pay for it all. But we’ve been kicking this can down the road for so long that the average American thinks that his or her grandkids will pay for it, not him or her. We’re talking such big numbers that they’ve completely lost all sense of ability to pertain to individuals. When I’m told that the deficit is approaching $13 trillion, they may as well tell me it’s $13 BAZILLION because a trillion is an amount that my little head is never going to grasp. I’m still having a hard time grasping the thousands that one day I have to pay off for student loans. Trillions is bordering on ludicrous to me. So multiply that by 300 million people (equally ridiculous) and you start to understand why the average person doesn’t care one bit.

In the end, the average American is convinced one of two things will happen: The debt will somehow disappear, or we’ll continue to kick the can down the road for a few more decades and never deal with it in our lifetimes. The other alternative, which is the more obvious one, is that the entire system will collapse, and the US will fall into some sense of anarchy, where people will have to fend for themselves until a bunch of rich people create a new government that they argue is “for the people”. The average person, like average people throughout time, really have no say so in the whole matter and figure that the affairs of state are better left to the people who seem to enrich themselves regardless of the type of government we have. The very concept of the US collapsing is laughable to most every American, for the simple reason that it has never happened before. Sure, we’ve had revolutions (one), and we’ve had civil wars (one), but for the most part, the system has been in place for multiple generations where not a single person alive today living n the United States has ever seen this country as anything other than the government we have today. The very possibility of collapse is unimaginable.

Which means that when it happens, no one will see it coming. And that will make the anarchy that much more like a hell on Earth, kind of like St. Augustine talked about when the Roman Empire finally collapsed. No one saw it coming then, and they danced in the streets while the empire burned. And then they woke up from their drunken spree through anarchy to realize that they had to try to put it all back together again.

They didn’t call it the dark ages for nothing.

Drowning in Misleading Information About Technology

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About six months ago, I decided to give up my iPhone for an Android phone. I’ve never been a real fan of Apple, the company, although I have somewhat been on the sidelines for Apple, the technology. The iPhone was definitely one of their best products ever, and I bought one when they first emerged. Then I upgraded to the second generation of the phone, which I believe was the 3G or 3GS (I get them confused). One of the things I really liked about the cell phone (my first real smart phone) was its long battery life. There were times when I went several days before recharging it.

One of the problems with the original iPhone was that you had to go through AT&T. That’s another one of those companies that I’ve learned to live to love and hate, sometimes in the same sentence. Their customer service is atrocious, no matter how hard their PR people try to make it seem otherwise. And sometimes dealing with them as a customer can be a freaking nightmare. But when you don’t have to deal with that side of the house, they do what they need to do, and things generally go smoothly. Not exactly a five-star endorsement, but you take what you can get, I guess.

Well, I discovered at one point that I couldn’t block calls on my iPhone no matter what I did. I was getting nonstop calls from telemarketers and bill collectors (most not even for me), and it was becoming really frustrating. So I looked to Apple to see if there was an app to fix this. There’s not. Apple doesn’t like you to block things, and if Steve Jobs doesn’t like something, that’s just the way every customer will experience the customer experience. Also, AT&T sucks in this area, as they couldn’t figure out a way to stop this other than to block a call (each one), to which they would charge me a nominal ($10) price to do so EACH TIME. That wasn’t a solution.

So, I bought a Sprint Samsung Epic phone (after trying out a few crappy Sprint phones). So far, I’ve been massively disappointed in Sprint. I mean MASSIVELY. They drop calls constantly, and they have finally acknowledged that there’s something wrong in Grand Rapids, although they can’t figure out what it is, but they’re not willing to really do anything to make the experience better other than to offer a different phone (on the same crappy service, which is actually the problem).

And the smart phone isn’t really that smart. In so many ways, Android fails. Miserably. I use Touchdown to link my work email, and whenever I have an appointment on my calendar, any change to the at calender appointment adds a brand new apointment (AND) leaves the old one in place, so that even though I’ve changed my appointment, my phone constantly wants to remind me at the old time that there’s an appointment, even if there no longer is one. When you work in a place where people are changing their appointments all of the time, this makes your calendar somewhat useless. Again, failure of miserable proportions.

The other day, my phone stopped working. For no reason. And then the next day, it started working again. No explanation. Meanwhile, two people phoned me and kept getting voicemail, which they left messages. No messages, of course, ever went through because, well, Sprint sucks.

So I contacted AT&T again, trying to figure out if there’s some way to get the new iPhone 4, and it turns out that I’m in my upgrade range now. What I didn’t know, until I asked a few colleagues who had iPhone 4s on both AT&T and Verizon, that the battery life of the iPhone 4 is no better than my crappy Samsung epic. For some reason, Apple made a brand new phone that is worse than the previous version. My 3G goes for days; the iPhone 4 doesn’t go longer than a half of a day, which seems to be the life span (battery wise) of almost all smart phones these days. That’s just crappy.

So, it looks like I may end up staying with my old iPhone 3G because it’s still the best phone on the market. It doesn’t matter that we’re already into an iPhone 4, and probably moving to an iPhone 5. I doubt it’s going to be much better itself. And every Android phone made is massively dysfunctional, yet it’s branded as the “thing to beat Apple”. If that’s the case, then we’re still a few years away from ever getting something decent out on the market that fills the need of the rest of us.

And that sucks.

Several days after the Rapture didn’t happen….

Education, News, Politics, Religion, , , , , , , , , ,

There are a lot of people congratulating themselves on predicting the predictions of the crazy religious guy were not going to happen. Atheists laugh because it makes them feel, well, more justified in their belief that nothing exists, religious leaders feel better knowing that they still hold all of the cards (people can’t determine religious events without relying a church), and everyone else breathes a sigh of relief because Saturday didn’t end with a bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale-like moment in reality. As we in the academic community like to ask, was there a teaching moment in all of this?

I’m going to venture that the answer is no. We didn’t learn anything from this, and chances are pretty good that when the next nutcase comes along, the media will hype his drivel insanely, and in the end, they’ll act like they were the sober ones all along. In other words, we’re never really going to win.

But I did want to ask a rhetorical question just for the fun of it: What if the rapture happened, but no one actually observed it? Think about that for a moment. Everyone talks about how the Rapture is going to be some fire and brimstone moment, but in reality all religious tellings tell us is that it’s going to be a moment when God brings all the worthy up to Heaven to avoid the eventual destructive battle that will take place between Satan, Jesus and, well, the rest of us. But we make a massively interesting conclusion that because the event didn’t happen in a way that was televised by Fox News and CNN that, therefore, it didn’t happen.

What if it did?

What if instead of a big, televised moment, the “worthy” were actually brought up to Heaven and the rest of us are now about to go through the rest of the story? I mean, how many people are really “worthy” to begin with? Think about that one for a moment, just on the semantic principles alone. How many people go to church every Sunday (or whatever day that organization holds its religious functions)? Of those, how many are actually living their lives in true, Christian morality, as opposed to the kind of morality that uses the thought process of “well, I generally do what I’m supposed to do, but it’s so easy to sin, and, well, it happens to everyone”? I ask this because even priests molest children, and their churches don’t hold them accountable, which means even their institutions of religion are seriously corrupt. So, if someone had to actually go out on a spiritual limb and say, who amongst you is truly devout and truly submissive to your specific religion, I argue that there really aren’t that many to begin with. I’m assuming there are probably so few actual idealized indivduals of this nature so that if the Rapture did take place, maybe no one would have noticed because so few people would have been brought up to Heaven in the first place. I figure, thinking generally, that the major numbers of the population all fit into the not so perfect category so that chances are pretty strong that when the Rapture happens, it’s going to happen in such a way that very few of us are ever going to be brought up in all its spiritual wonderfulness. If you buy into that sort of thing.

So if there really is a Rapture, maybe it happened, and the majorit of us turned out to be unworthy of the honor. If you think hard about it, it’s probably not that hard to realize that such a possibility is massively, scarily true. Remember, if you believe in that sort of thing, to the point where religion is that significant to you, how hard is it to make a leap of faith that might point out that an all-knowing God isn’t going to miss any of the nuances that make it possible for the “perfect” religious soul to be lacking in all things necessary to make it worthy of ascendance. I’m just saying.

So, like I said, maybe the Rapture happened, and so few of us got brought up to Heaven. I’d be more interesting in doing a missing persons search to see if a few people went missing that day. I’d argue that they probably live such unimportant lives, unfilled with the morass that we package as fame and fortune, so that so few of the rest of us would ever notice they left. We focus on famous people, celebrities, and the very wealthy, all of whom I would argue would never fit into this category of the person who would be brought up to Heaven for a moment like the Rapture. Oh sure, they’ll protest and get their throngs of followers to condemn such a thought, but no matter how many times Charlie Sheen talks about #winning, it’s really not winning if he’s as corrupt (or worse) as the rest of us when it comes down to the cosmic, spiritual questions.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I”m one of the good ones either. I mean, I’m here, right? No angels descended, grabbed me and brought me up to Heaven, although a very attractive convenience store clerk did give me the eye the other day, so maybe I just missed the sign. I mean, I have as much experience in this sort of thing as anyone else, including the Pope, who would love to convince the rest of us that he has a direct phone line to the Almighty, but in reality has to stand in line like the rest of us; he’s just a lot more comfortable standing in line.

Now, having said all that, the odds are pretty good that we were bamboozled by yet another charlatan who tried to get money out of his many followers by pretending to be something he wasn’t. And chances are pretty good that another one will show up shortly after he disappears from fame and will do it again. And we’ll fall for it again because we’re stupid humans who don’t know any better. I mean, we play the Lotto in hopes of winning and have fights over baseball and football games that sometimes lead to serious injuries and death, not because we’re brilliant, but because we’re generally really stupid people who only can claim advanced evolution beyond primatives because we’re capable of making cell phone calls on our weekend and nights data packages that we pay extra for.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. No one does. But we’ll gladly pay money to anyone who lies to us to convince us there are more answers than we can ascertain by looking up at the sky and seeing that the stars haven’t changed one bit in the last thousand years.

So What if Tomorrow Ends Up Being the Day of Rapture?

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Doomsday predictions predict that tomorrow, Saturday, is supposed to be the day of rapture, when God takes up all of the good people and leaves the rest of us to deal with Satan’s return, Armageddon and all the theatrics that entails. Most people talking about tomorrow completely get it wrong and think tomorrow is Armageddon, but don’t realize that it’s only the day of Rapture. My understanding is that it’s followed by four months or so of hell on Earth and then the final end.

As expected, most people are laughing at the predictions, mainly because they come from a crackpot guy who supposedly has predicted Armageddon six times before, and not surprisingly, he hasn’t goten it right yet. So, the confidence people have in him being right the sixth time isn’t all that strong. Therefore, it’s being treated as a big joke.

But what if he’s right? What if the Rapture happens tomorrow? What do we do then?

Well, most people aren’t considering that because once that happens, it becomes a bit too late. But the possibilities, and that narrative of the story going forward have always fascinated me. I mean, the argument is that after God takes up all of the good people, he leaves the planet to everyone else to fight over. But my question has always been: “Who is fighting whom?” I mean, if all of the “good” people are gone, once Satan returns, who does this final battle take place with? The apathetic? The undecided? People who suddenly turn good because they realized the Rapture was true and that has made them sudden believers? That part has never really made a lot of sense to me from a narrative perspective.

So that means that after Saturday, if a large segment of the population disappears, there should be a whole bunch of people left over who should suddenly become instant believers. I mean, what more proof do you need than to see it actually happen? Would someone really remain an atheist if subjected to acts of God that are so obvious and present that there’s no disputing it any longer? And then, does that mean that God would then punish a whole bunch of new believers because they didn’t sign on before it was too late? Questions of this type of religiosity have always plagued me because it means to me that we have what can only be considered an unjust God, and if that’s the case, then it negates the very wonderful nature that religion should be in the first place.

Unfortunately, tomorrow is most likely going to be a day as uneventful as the next. Except a bunch of people who were devote believers are going to be faced with the fact that their beliefs were taken advantage of by yet another deceiver who used them for personal monetary gain and a quest for power. As these people would have to be seriously devoted believers, this means that they put their faith forward for the wrong reasons, which means, to be, a total waste of such great devotion that seems truly unfortunate, because it’s hard enough to find anyone with an ouce of faith in anything these days. And once someone of such devotion has had his or her faith dragged through the mud once again, that can’t make the next leap of faith occur just as easily, which means that where faith has become forlorn, what is left for them to believe in? And will they ever believe in anything again?

I think people who do this disservice to them do the ultimate disservice to mankind and the better nature of humanity. But they are NEVER held accountable for it. Instead, they will hit replay on the calendar and start recruiting more devoted followers to follow them down yet another rabbit hole of future despair and ultimate depravity. Sadly enough, those they follow will claim the ranks of the truly religious, of highest faith, and in reality, they will destroy the very foundation of which that faith was first built.

And no one will ever question it well enough to keep it from happening again.

Advocating Peace Elsewhere & Still Needing to Get Your Shit Together At Home

Business, Economics, Politics, Relationships, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Over the last few days, President Obama has been trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This isn’t anything new. Every president from Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon and Kennedy have been trying to do the same thing. NONE of them have ever succeeded. A couple of them got momentary results that sounded great, like Carter. And the world was so grateful, they even gave some of these presidents Nobel Peace prizes for their great efforts. But in the end, the peace fell apart because Israel and Palestine know only two modes: Cease fire and open fire. Long term peace isn’t in their vocabulary. They have generations of hate between them so that the only way they’ll ever end up with peace is for one side to completely eliminate the other. Sorry, but the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same stupid things over and over again, hoping for better results.

But that’s really not even the issue I want to discuss. What I find even more fascinating is that we have a president right now who is trying to instigate peace (I guess he wants to actually earn that Nobel Peace Prize he got for just showing up for work without actually doing anything to deserve it; hey, I voted for him and supported him, but even I know that was the most ridiculous prize awarded in the history of the Nobel, right after the one they probably gave to Vlad Putin for creating peace by wresting with bears). No, what I want to talk about is this ridiculous tendency we have to try to create “peace” around the world when we can’t seem to figure out how to instigate it in our own country.

Believe it or not, there is a non-violent civil war going on in the United States right now. The only thing missing is actual violence, because we have a line right down the middle of the ideological sides of the country, and neither side is capable of getting along with the other. Just look at the current state of the Republican Party. There’s a man running for their nod for president (Gingrich) who is being chastised because he dared to side against Republicans through some of the usual stupid things he normally says (like disagreeing with Ryan over the budget mess). At the same time, we have members of Congress on the right who are probably going to lose their backing because they might have made the mistake of being friendly with other congress members on the left. And then we’re starting to see the same kinds of actions from the left, chastising their own members for daring to work with the right. The Gang of Six (a group of legislators who dared to come to the middle and try to work things out) has been deep sixed (for lack of better words) because the rest of their parties are outraged (outraged, I say!) that members on one side would dare to come to any kind of consensus with the other.

If you go to places like Wisconsin, you see entire parties rallying against the others to the point of advocating criminal actions against the other side (how dare you leave the state to avoid a lopsided vote!). Read a column by Ann Coulter, or even the more even-handed Michelle Malkin, and you read nothing but vitriolic hatred waged against the other side. Read (or listen to) anything coming out of Michael Moore’s camp, and you experience the exact same kind of hatred from the other side. People in this country are communicating behind battle lines and the hatred is so present in practically everything they say that I’m not surprised that this country has become completely dysfunctional. No one is willing to cooperate with each other because everyone is so angry, and when people become angry they become incapable of thinking clearly and justly. The goal is to achieve points in an ideological battle, not consensus and understanding. And even worse, they’re incapable of even recognizing that, or if they are capable, they see it through filters that see the other side as the one responsible and everything they do is rational and just. These are the kinds of conversations that appear as screaming sessions on late night news shows, where people aren’t communicating, but they’re trying to get as much of their arguments in as possible because if they stop to listen it would take away from the time they get to present their full case.

This is the environment we live in today, and yet our president is trying to foster peace elsewhere. If President Obama wants to foster peace, how about actually trying to do it here. I don’t mean compromising, or making the other side look bad, because that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few years. I’m talking about actually putting forth a serious initiative about creating peace in the United States. Stop using rhetoric to push agendas, unless the agenda is to stop using rhetoric to push agendas. We’re really good at anger and hatred; I’d like to see how good we can become at being a unified country again. We haven’t been one for a very long time now. And I’m sure a reader is probably thinking to himself/herself, “well, that’s because of the people on the other side.” And that’s why we’ll never move forward.

Which is why we’ll never have peace in the Middle East, I should point out. Because as much as I’ve been talking about the stupid rhetoric of the people in the United States, believe it or not, it’s the same reason we’ve never had peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Both sides have to be right, to the point of swords and death. Compromising means weakness, and thus, a direction we can never move. Why would anyone expect a country where we can’t agree on whether or not fixing the budget is a national priority that we’d somehow be able to instill peace somewhere else?

In the Worst of Times, the Common People Turn on Each Other While the Greedy Hide and Laugh

Business, Economics, Education, Politics, , , , , , ,

It’s turning out to be a very interesting few years lately, now that we’re heading into the decade of the recession. While an economist might argue the recession is over, another might claim it’s still in the future, and another might chime in with the idea that it’s really a depression, and yet one more might claim things have never been better, the simple fact of the matter is that times are tight, and times are tough for a lot of people. If you buy into the lie that Americans are famous for sticking together, you’d be waiting for those Americans to band together and look out for one another. If you buy into the idea that banding together is a crock of crap, you’d probably recognize it when Americans have a tendency to kick anyone who is down and then point fingers, blaming that person for all of the troubles.

Unfortunately, the latter is how we’re responding to pretty much everything. In Michigan, for example, the legislators realized that obviously the people causing all of the problems must be teachers, and have now met and decided that they would tax teachers more (causing them to pay more money for their health care). The teachers, letting their response come from their union, have indicated that they are shocked that the people can so easily turn against them, especially when they are the ones teaching little Johnny to read. Well, if you listen to the people of Michigan, you might start to wonder how it is that the common person has become such a critic of anyone who would dare to be a teacher in this state. Some of the comments are outright hostile, and anyone who comes into the conversation backing teachers is immediately branded as stupid, corrupt, and some kind of radical communist who is teaching Johnny to build napalm bombs to kill all of Johnny’s friends at school.

When did it get to be this way? I know there was a recent batch of hostility towards community college professors for making over $100,000 a year in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being a community college professor, although part time, I found myself shocked that the population of the city (and state) was nothing but hostile towards teachers. It was as if they were personally paying for these salaries from their own money, and because they weren’t making $100,000 themselves, no one else deserved it.

Now, I’ve come to the conclusion as to why those professors do make over $100,000 a year. This summer, I was offered absolutely no classes to teach as an adjunct (which is the lowest pay of any kind of instructor). Instead, the full-time instructors get first grab at all classes, and of course, they get the premium rate for taking those classes. Thus, their pay aut0matically heads up to those $100,000 figures we were talking about. The solution is simple: Hire adjuncts who are struggling to survive as it is. But instead, they hire the guys (and gals) who are arguably overpaid for the semesters they have already taught. The conclusions are obvious, but no one seems to figure it out, and thus, people will continue to complain.

But back to the hostility towards instructors and teachers. My opinion on this is that people really aren’t anti-teachers themselves but are anti-union, because the unions involved in these decisions are beholden to a tenure structure that massively benefits these teachers. Most every other worker in the state is not a member of a union with such power and prestige, so all they can see is that this class of workers is highly compensated and protected, and the average citizen is never offered the same kinds of protections themselves.

An example is my own job. I’m an at will employee, mainly because I do not belong to a union. I’m not advocating one, by the way, but at the same time because none of us have a union that we belong to, we have no such protections that these teachers all seem to have in their corners. It should not be surprising that those without the same protections are going to see those who are protected as “others” and thus, someone to be criticized for excess and outrageous behavior. It doesn’t take much of an analysis to see how a person in a union of such protection would then be perceived as someone who has too much of a good thing. And then you have a whole bunch of people running around hating teachers. The one to one logic doesn’t follow, but the eventual demise into hatred towards a class of people makes sense, especially if you understand group mob-like mentality.

If one is capable of distincing oneself from the passions of this argumentation, one is then also capable of seeing what is really happening in the background. There are people who benefit from this hostility, and they’re often never even involved in the discussions. I’m talking about corporate leaders and politicians who dig into this rhetoric, using it to feed entire careers of corrupt government service. I say corrupt because when you use the passions of people to rile them up and then benefit from stupidity, all the while doing nothing to solve anything, that’s corruption by manipulation of the masses. Yet, this happens all of the time, and continues to happen to this day.

This is why the whole debacle in Wisconsin took place. Politicians, enriching themselves on hatred and anger, orchestrated people to do all sorts of stupid things at no benefit to the people, yet in great benefit to people in power who seek to continue manipulating power. No one else benefits. Instead, people lost rights, money and power, all in the name of some other people using them through continued manipulation.

It’s happening in Michigan right now. We live in a very poor state that is suffering because a lot of very bad, corrupt politicians really only saw the benefits for themselves by rallying up the masses to make stupid decisions for themselves. Look at Detroit if you need to see a great example of this. Corrupt politicians, hiding money they stole directly from the people, cheated the people by promising to be something yet delivering the complete opposite. And then when they were called to account for their misdeeds, they claimed they were targets of politics or racism, or whatever else they could come up with to continue rallying the people behind them while they socked away more money before they were thrown from office (and sometimes directly into prison so they can wait it out before they are able to cheat the people again). Meanwhile, they continue to pretend that the people need to support them at their own best interest, and as always the people end up being screwed.

And when it comes down to it, some politician will use ridiculous rhetoric to lead the people down the wrong path again. And we’ll follow. As we always do.

Because we’re stupid. And to justify our stupidity, we’ll point our fingers at someone else who is probably just going about his business doing something that doesn’t affect anyone else in a bad way. And we’ll pounce on him. Hard.

Because we’re stupid. And we don’t know how to do it any other way.