>> ^notarobot:

Haiti, Chile, New Zealand, and now Japan? Is the earth trying to shake us off or what?


Don't forget the new volcanic activity in Hawaii...the plates are a'moving, and the magma plume's looking for a new path of least resistance. All in all, if there's a message, it's that we should appreciate the period of relative climatic and geological stability that have given us these wonderful tools and toys, and we should dedicate ourselves to do whatever is necessary to hold onto them a little while longer. Perhaps one should be using them less as toys, and more as tools.

Well, this is one of those "Tragedy of the Commons" scenarios, where, sure it'd be nice if the one guy with one sheep could graze for free, while the people with 10 or more sheep would have to pay some sort of maintenance fee, but it doesn't work like that. This is precisely the same argument as why universal health care must force some people who'd like to press their luck to buy insurance. Pretty soon a whole lot of guys with 'one' sheep are grazing for free, and one of the owners of the larger herds are whistling away in the corner, with seemingly zero sheep. Should the number of 'comped' appearances one can have before having to join AFTRA be raised? I dunno. I'm sure that number didn't come out of someone's ass. While it might not seem so, AFTRA is indeed looking out for you, as it does anyone who works in the industry. You might not appreciate it as a lowly peon, but you would if you found yourself being 'requested' to be an extra, over and over, for less and less pay each time. Remember what Chris Rock said about minimum wage ("If I _could_ pay you less, I would")? The same premise holds for any exchange between an impersonal employer and a faceless employee. AFTRA's trying to give you a face.

I'm in a public sector union, and a co-worker's spouse has a job with an employer where most of the staff are union, and he's not, and no one knows that he's not. He gets a lot of work on the side, but he also gets a lot of crap jobs that no one wants, and he can't turn them down, because they'll find someone else who WILL do them, for a cheaper rate. She complains to me all the time about how the boss treats him, and, quietly, I'll ask her if the boss treats the union guys the same way. "No," she'll reply, thinking. In truth, she thinks he should join, but they've gone so far down this road that to admit that he'd never been a member would cause real problems in the workplace. I never told her, but I think that if he went to the shop steward and said, "I now know why unions exist, and I'd like to join," they'd have him in a heartbeat.

>> ^shuac:

Awesome. The investigation won't be very impactful but the negative publicity will affect their membership drive. That's how the church survives. Any church, really.


Not really. If you read Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, about Mormonism, he points out that many religions THRIVE on perceived persecution. It scratches that, "What is everyone so upset about? Let me check them out for myself--they might be on to something" itch.

I've served on two juries, and in both cases, I came to the part of the questionnaire where I promise to not exercise the principle of jury nullification. Of course it doesn't SAY "jury nullification." If it said that, someone would wait until voir dire to ask, and the shit would really hit the fan. In Cook County, IL, people have been held in contempt of court for mentioning those two words in front of the jury pool. In both cases, I clicked, "Yes", that I would not exercise the principle, then promptly vowed to do so if the case called for it. Dishonest? Perhaps, but not as dishonest as the court saying that I did not have the right in the first place. As it happens, I sorta exercised it in one case, when I was named foreman (I stepped into the washroom while we first entered the jury room, and emerged foreman). The case involved an accident along a stretch of road that I knew well, and the plaintiff did a terrible job of describing the trickiness of merging there. I introduced evidence not presented by either side (essentially a detailed diagram of the roadway). The result was that we asked more insightful questions to each other and were able to determine relative culpability far more easily. I hadn't made up my mind prior to entering the jury room, and used my 'extra knowledge' to clarify, not influence. It's been almost nine years, and I have not been called since. If I do, I won't check that box.

Easily the most depressing bit I've seen on the Daily Show. Well worth watching, and talking about.

Reminds me a lot of the sniper sequence in The Hurt Locker, and how silly computer games and roleplaying games are. They sit there for what seems to be hours, watching and waiting, because they have no clue 1) how many sniper teams are out there and 2) if they managed to hurt those they've spotted enough to end their threat. As this video shows, there's no *plink* of experience points once a kill has been established. I found it really hard to go back to playing Fallout 3 and other games after watching the film.

While I think that if this happens to a single borrower, it's one too many, I found it very interesting how many contortions the expert went through to avoid talking about the extent of the problem. A simple number, either a percent or an estimate of the number of borrowers being screwed, would have clarified much. As it stands, she went out of her way to NOT give a number, which leads me to believe that it's quite small, and while a problem, not worthy of a 10 minute segment.

And while I do appreciate the "borrowers are totally to blame for not going over the fine print" sentiment, I'm really tired of the unspoken rule of business, which, if true, needs to be written into every contract ever signed, which is, "We will be utter cockbags, no matter what. Given a chance to be a cockbag, we will embrace our darkest impulses every fucking time." If that language is in there, there'd be a lot less problems from the borrowers in the long run.

Hrm. In reading QM's silliness, a thought occurred to me--how many homeowners actually own their homes? In a strictly legal sense, until you pay off your mortgage, doesn't the bank actually own the land? Back when land was a necessary requirement for voting rights, people owned their land, free and clear. Would it work now?

And one could also argue that all Americans who pay taxes do indeed own land--all public land is held in our names.

Some comments:

1) "Idolators" really doesn't refer to followers of Judaism or Christians. Idolatry was outlawed in the Ten Commandments. That being said, there's a whole lotta bowin' and genuflectin' in the Roman Catholic Church. Still, that's NOT what was meant by 'idolators'. It referred to the pagan/animistic precursors of Islam, and it called for a zero tolerance policy toward those who were not 'people of the book'. So effective was this that there really are none around today.

2) If I read him right, he's calling for Crusade. I mean, all those guys were fighting defensive wars, and they managed to drive the Muslim invasion away from their doorsteps. However, the reason WHY they were fighting in Vienna and Constantinople and Lepanto was that Charles Martel stopped them at Tours, then let them walk away--keep all of Spain, in fact. Now all this seems to ignore that there was a whole lot of tit-for-tat fighting going on. They'd attack Christian Europe, and Christian Europe would attack them right back. In almost all cases, the conflict was couched in a religious context, but was really more of a geopolitical struggle. The only thing that could stop this struggle is the aforementioned Crusade, except this one would end with two significant cities in the Arabian Peninsula wiped off the map. The thing is--he tells us what might help, but he doesn't for a moment suggest what we could do in the modern context. This is the worst kind of 'expert'--someone who will freely share all the problems, and say that the solutions are quite apparent, and then fail to share what those solutions might be.

3) I've had several students over the years (I taught high school) actively try to convert me to Islam. I'd listen to them, because it was something about which they were passionate, and you never want to dampen their spirits. I would then pull out a map, and show them the growth of Islam. I'd ask them how it got from Mecca to Tours in 100 years. Inevitably they'd come up with some wonderful fairy tale about how people would hear the words of the Prophet, and convert on the spot. I then pointed out that they pretty much cut their way across North Africa, and swept into Spain, and if not for Charles Martel, Christianity might have been wiped off the earth. Did they think that Martel was the first person to say, "No, thanks?" This usually made them quite uncomfortable, because what followed that period was a time of (relative) peace in an area not known for its stability. "How many people honestly and openly chose Islam, do you think?" Again, they'd get uncomfortable. Is Islam all about peace? Sure it is--as long as Islam is on top. But that's pretty much the story with Christianity, right? That's the source of all this talk about America being a "Christian" nation. It seems to have little to do with actual tenets of faith, and everything to do with BRAND IDENTITY.

The real question, then, is this: How many modern Muslims are willing to go back to the old way of doing things? Damn few, it turns out. That's what this whole "perversion" thing is about. Those who would ignore EVERYTHING the modern world offers and KILL PEOPLE to get it are, in fact, very few in numbers, but the fruits of this modern world allow small groups of determined people to unleash mayhem. People like that can be found in every faith, political party, and ideology. The idea that their way might not be the right way scares the hell out of them, and they'd do anything to feel absolutely sure. How do we fight this? How have we ever fought ignorance? Knowledge and time. Crusade never works.

There's a chapter in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them which recounts Franken's encounter with Barbara Bush on a plane. Apparently she's not a very pleasant person.

>> ^Simple_Man:

You can't say tits on TV? What sort of world do we live in where tits can be on display, but you can't say what they are?


Let's go to the expert:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrD6k8PDr1o

Jump to 1:53.

Yup. Can't say it.

Peer pressure has little to do with it. The reason why it won't be effective if shown in high schools is that teen drivers are well aware of the consequences of 'aggressive driving'. What they're terrible at is assessing risk, the likelihood that THIS TIME there will be a pedestrian there when they pass on the right. Given time, their prefrontal cortex will mature, and experience will temper the notion that every moment is a novel opportunity where anything can happen. Sadly, the brains of some adolescents will never mature sufficiently, usually due to stress in the environment. That's all the thoughtless asshole drivers out in the road today. The problem is that if these commercials (the ones that are PSAs) are aimed at them, it's a lost cause. They can't see that any of this applies to them. Then they run out to play the lottery.

I did have a friend who walked away from a roll-over crash that crossed the median of the highway and four lanes on the other side. His advice to me (a novice driver at age 24) was that most people, when they sense a collision is imminent, jam on the brakes. This is, as you can imagine, a terrible idea for a number of reason. With a smile he said, "Just go faster. When THEY jam on THEIR brakes, you'll be surprised what options the laws of physics close for them, and open for you."

There have been a number of books that dealt with the subject:

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Freakonomics had a section about how terrible we as humans are in gauging the likelihood of something awful happening. The authors illustrate their point by asking you if your child would be safer visiting a friend who had a swimming pool in the back yard, or a friend whose parents owned a handgun. As you could guess, the swimming pool is 100 times more dangerous than the handgun.

Of course, each of these books have extensive references in the back.

I think the problem is that the item is food, and one that's not normally eaten wet. If we were asked to get something that we suspected could float and wouldn't be harmed, we would think of water.

Then again, when I clicked on the link, I expected the chimp to pee in it. I didn't see that he had access to lots of water, but I suspected that he had access to lots of pee.

I assiduously avoided any commentary about the film until I was able to judge it for myself, and was interested to see that Nolan had started work on the script while shooting Memento. Given that The Matrix came out in 1999 and Memento in 2000, it's not a stretch to consider that Nolan had seen The Matrix and, like the rest of us, was really thinking about it. Now most people HATEHATEHATE the Matrix sequels, but there's a moment at the end of the second one where it still could have been all right, where all the craziness would suddenly make sense, but the filmmakers would have to trust the audience to follow them down the rabbit hole. I speak of course of the moment when Neo raises his hand and shuts down the Sentinels. How the frick could he do that?!? The answer, to me, was obvious: Neo/Thomas Anderson realized that "The Desert of the Real" (as Morpheus referred to it) was just another construct fashioned by the machines. Everything we've been told supports this conclusion. I don't want to go into too much detail, but as I was watching Inception, it occurred to me that Nolan came to the exact same conclusion I did, and was just as pissed as I was when the Wachowskis failed to trust their audience (as seen in the third film). Inception, then, is a think piece not only about the nature of reality, but how little things can build to dangerous proportions if we let them.

To me, the most wonderful thing about Inception was its completely incomprehensible trailer. We were shown disparate images that make not a lick of sense, and left me feeling rather put out. Upon watching the film, I realized that the trailer showed us EVERYTHING without actually telling us ANYTHING. It was the fevered fragments of a dream, seconds after waking. Since that's pretty much what the movie is about, mission accomplished, trailer-makers.