Human Rights Campaign

Look I get it, changing your profile pic is easy. It's a way to show support without actually having to go out and, you know, work at supporting something. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying that if you took the ten seconds out of your day to do that - think back and see where you took the next amount of time out to do something that might actually affect a change. This is a start, but please sit down for a moment and think about why you did it before you pat yourself on the back for being supportive.

There's really only two reasons for changing your profile pic to support a cause - because you want to raise awareness of an issue or because you want to let people know where you stand on an issue.

If the former, I doubt there's that many people who don't know that LGTB rights are an issue so who exactly are we trying to raise awareness in?

If the latter - if you're friends don't know where you stand on the defining civil rights issue of our generation - then you are doing something TERRIBLY wrong with your life and this is not the way to rectify that.

This kind of "activism" all too often takes the place of real people trying to make real changes happen. If you support LGBT rights, then write to your politicians, call them on the phone, organize or participate in a march in real life - because regardless of how much time we all spend online these communities are still seen as fringe by most people in positions of power.

Actively engage people in debate and stand so tall and proud on your principles that people can't help but acknowledge what you know is right.

This right here though? If this is all you're doing? Then this is just plain laziness.

So yeah, my two cents. There you have it.

(And as a sidenote, if you identify as an "ally" and are looking for a way to customize the pic, make it something "cool" or more indicative of you - then you are missing the point by such a wide margin I don't even know where to start.)

Bootstraps

“For a political party that's all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, [Republicans] rely on god for a lot of handouts. These are the same people who tell the single mother who was just laid off ‘Oh, you can't get unemployment or food stamps. What am I gonna do? Well I’m gonna talk to my friend in the sky to help me.’

That is cheating and Ronald Reagan would be ashamed of you.” - Jamie Kilstein

Occupy Oakland

I'm a backseat revolutionary. I see that there are problems in the world but I either a) have faith that the people in government actually care and are trying to fix things, or b) feel like it can't be fixed. Either way, I generally don't get involved. There are very few issues I'm passionate about and they almost never come up in the news as they are a little (lot) fringe.

On Tuesday night, I was sitting in my new apartment reading textsfromlastnight and watching X-Factor. A fairly solid American night in. I toggled over to twitter and suddenly my tweetstream was on fire. I began to see pictures of people showing injuries from rubber bullets. Video of groups trying to outrun clouds of tear gas being set by the police. I started checking tweets from people who were there and the outcry was unanimous. A group of people marching in protest had been violently responded to by the Oakland PD. And the best defense Oakland could come up with was that protesters had thrown "paint and other hazardous chemicals"* at the police. Also, hearsay about one M-80 being thrown at a police officer.

I was stunned by this, and I sat in shock on my couch as I started frantically switching between news outlets both on my TV and online trying to find someone who was covering what was going on. At the time, only ABC was saying anything, and that wasn't much.

It didn't take long for me to move from stunned into angry. I very rarely get truly mad about something, although I get frustrated fairly easily, and when I do it generally has to do with injustice. Here was a group of people trying to make things better for everyone, being violently opposed by their own government.

Now, I'm not sure I support Occupy Wall Street. I understand and agree with what they are trying to do, but I'm not sure their methods are exactly the best. But on Tuesday night it didn't matter. These were US citizens being treated like a criminals.

I wrote the number of the one person I thought might bail me out of jail on my arm and I jumped in my car.

I'm not sure what I thought I would accomplish. One more person wasn't going to make a difference. But I couldn't think of any other way to let Oakland PD and indeed all of America know that this wasn't right. This isn't what America is supposed to look like. Not ever.

I'm pretty sure I parked illegally - every cop for forty miles had their hands full two blocks north of me, who was going to give me a ticket? And I started jogging towards 14th street.

Then a bang.

Bang doesn't even begin to cover the sound it made when it went off. It was loud enough to make me stop dead, jarring enough to stop my heart. The noise was less than two blocks away and I had no idea whether it was a gunshot, an explosion, or some even scarier third category.

That's when I saw the people running. And right behind them, like a monster from a Stephen King novel, a cloud of smoke.

It felt far away. Like another planet. Very unreal. Honestly, the sound of the canister going off frightened me more than the idea of the gas itself.

Until a change in breeze pushed the edges of the cloud my direction.

I didn't get a full face of tear gas. I can't imagine how painful that would be. The brief exposure I had made it almost impossible to breath and left me retching into the side of a building.

People, I guess with the same idea I'd had originally, were running past me to those who had caught the full brunt of the gas - pulling people out of the way, washing their eyes out with water and lending a shoulder for those who were having difficulty moving on their own.

This was the 'mob', this was the 'riot' that police from all over the East Bay had been called out to respond to.

Oh yes, this is an unruly group of people, what with their cameras and mobile phones. The only time a camera becomes dangerous is if you throw it someone's head. And by the looks of them they cost more than I make in a month so I sincerely doubt that was going on.

Now, I admit this was not all, or even a majority of the people down at Occupy Oakland. The people who had started it were behind the barricades, still fighting in many ways for their lives. There is no such thing as 'non-lethal', only 'less-lethal'. Can you imagine the fear? You're facing a much larger force which has already proven how far they were willing to take things on virtually no provocation. What could that possibly feel like to the people trapped behind the barricades in downtown Oakland?

But the police were not containing their aggression to the 'official' Occupy Oakland protests. They weren't containing it behind the barricades, but openly firing into public spaces. They were firing upon journalists and photographers. Hipster onlookers and curious college students. They were firing on the people trying to help the people who were fired on before. This wasn't crowd dispersal, it was a police-led riot.

I didn't stick around to get arrested. I was disgusted with the police, with Oakland, and a little bit with myself as it became increasingly clear that there was nothing I could do to help this situation. I was just another body downtown making the police nervous.

So I went home.

I had to pull over twice because my eyes were stinging so bad I still couldn't see. I've had breathing troubles since then.

This isn't America. In no world should this be how people who are legally and peaceably protesting their government are treated.

I haven't been a big supporter of the Occupy movement, their's just wasn't a cause I felt I could get behind. But a government assaulting its citizens? I'm not just mad, I'm not just riled up, I'm fucking furious.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

-JFK

*If the top of your list of hazardous chemicals is 'paint', you're over-reacting. That's just a fact.

Priest

Priest takes place in a world where, due to a war with the extremely superior vampires, humanity has taken refuge in large city-state compounds where they are protected by a dominant and creepy church. A church that seems to have forgotten half of scripture - or maybe in this world the Bible reads "Let humans rule over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. Except vampires. Seriously, those guys will fuck you up." To combat the vampires, priests are created/born/magicked/summoned/trained (it's not really made clear) to fight the vampires and they do a damn good job as by the time the movie begins vampires are all but eradicted.

Enter the plot: A young girl who is related to our main character is kidnapped by vampires, including vampire Karl Urban. She is a lot more upset by this than I would be. Our hero, who doesn't have a name, sets off on an epic quest to rescue her - defying the church and picking up some help along the way. His non-spoilery help is an outland sheriff. His spoiler help is another priest, this one a woman who is desperately in love with him - one can only assume because he is Paul Bettany since he's quite clearly not interested in pursuing her in any way shape or form.

There are crazy beast-vampires, a cave troll (seriously, looked exactly like one), a vampire queen who we barely see or hear about but I was totally rooting for, human-vampires, old-west gunslinging and what-not and lots of other things happening. Despite all of these other things happening, easily 64% of the movie is this:

Someone was really proud of those motorcycles is all I'm saying. And if I can digress for a moment's not-really-spoilers nitpick: At points in the movie we see our characters on these open motorcycles going upwards of 200mph across the desert. I don't know if you've ever stuck your head out a car window (or ridden a motorcycle I suppose), but it becomes extremely difficult to breath once you hit about 60. Watch your dog sometime, he'll pull his head in around 45-50. And yet, our heroes seem to have no problems. Now, there is a scene where the pull up somewhere and take off both goggles and pull off respirators - which would explain how they manage to breath. But it's one scene in what is, dead serious, 64% of the movie. The rest of the time I kept expecting them to blackout and fall over mid-ride.

Anyway, back to the review.

On the plus side the CG was good, nothing to complain about and for the most part blended seamlessly with the movie. I would like to meet whoever did the matte-painting of the cities because they were pretty awesome. The vampires had some issues with actually being in the scene, not just comped in, but all in all the effects were enjoyable and were it not for the plot issues I'd say might be worth the money for 3D (even though it wasn't filmed in 3D and it irks me to pay an extra $6 for an often poorly rendered visual effect).

This movie had one of two major problems - and I find it hard to write about because I'm not sure which exactly it was suffering from. And the two are exact opposites. Either:

A) Priest had too many plotlines. I only cared about maybe two and the rest were boring and felt like filler. I HATED the sheriff character and wanted nothing more than to punch him in the face several times and tell him to STFU - Cam Gigandet did his best to sell the character, but he wasn't given an awful lot to work with. It should have been pared down to just Paul Bettany and Karl Urban - although the 'plot' concerning Urban's character could have been dropped too and just left him in for the pretty value. I enjoyed the character, don't get me wrong, but his motivations were never fleshed out enough to make him interesting. If they had cut everything down to just Bettany and made it into a futuristic vampire version of Taken it might have stood a chance.

B) There wasn't enough plot. I felt like there was this whole world to be explored - mysteries and intrigues and mythology that just never got touched upon. Is this story earth? Apparently not because humans and vampires have supposedly been engaged in a bloody war forever - not just recently. But if it's not earth - why the hell do they have the same bizarre church with the same bizarre mythology? Who made the priests? Why does vampiring work the way it does? How vampires work at all isn't really explained and some of the things that were said seem to contradict each other.

Somehow, defying all odds and logic to how stories work, Priest managed to stay perfectly between these two. The result of which is it had exactly the wrong amount of plot.

[Note: Okay, I know it was a comic book and thus the original source will likely answer some of my questions - but don't ever adapt something that can't stand on its own. It's like, the first rule of making an adaptation. See: Why Lord of the Rings was 10 hours long.]

[Note 2: I'm going to say right here, before I go any further, that I would LOVE to see a director's cut of this. I sincerely hope that they just cut too much out for the movie to stand up on its own. An editing mistake rather than 'this whole movie is awful' mistake.]

All props to Paul Bettany - and lord knows I love that man and I would go see anything he was in because he succeeds splendidly more times than he fails spectacularly - but this movie was just not good. And it was trying too hard to be good to be awesomely bad. Both he and Karl Urban acted their hearts out - and you could tell for sure that Urban was enjoying himself immensely - but you can give an Oscar-worthy performance in a movie and it won't change the fact that it's about Catholic Old West Vampires.

I feel like this movie should have been to vampires what Firefly was to scifi. A different take on an old formula that might have revitalized an entire genre. And maybe as a comic book it was. But as a movie, Priest lacks the charm to be endearing, the polish to be dramatic, and the cajones to be scary. All in all, it failed as a movie at the most basic levels.

With all the love in my heart for Mr Bettany and Mr Urban, I wish I had my $9 back.

Mohammad

This is a picture of the Prophet Mohammad. Because I say it is. I drew it, I should know.

This is also a picture of the Prophet Mohammad. Does he not look delicious?

Does saying that something is something else make it so? If you deny my apple is Mohammad (even though I assure you it is the most accurate of all representations) then at what point does my stick figure qualify?

What about this?
If I tell you this is Mohammad does that make it so? Would it offend a Muslim? If someone else calls it a line but I call it Mohammad, is it still an offense?

I do not respect religious belief any more than I would respect the belief in UFOs or the tooth fairy. I can respect you as a person without respecting your ideas. If the sight of a drawing (which lacking in one particular label is not offensive at all) is so offensive to you that you literally cannot abide it - that's your problem, not mine.

Math

A fly-by blog post because I love this quote so much:

"If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one."

—John Barrow

My Phlangy

Imagine I told you that there was club that could heal your broken phlangy. Wait a second, you might ask, I don't have a broken phlangy. I'm not even entirely certain I have a phlangy. No problem they tell you, all you have to do is agree that you have a broken phlangy and they'll make-sure your phlangy is in tip-top shape.

That doesn't sound like a great deal does it? The logical thing would be to ask them to prove you have a phlangy correct? They assure you that you do, otherwise you wouldn't be alive. You see you need a phlangy to live you see, and if you're alive that means you must have a phlangy.

But it's broken of course, and desperately needs to be fixed.

Now imagine that the people that are a part of this club think you are a terrible person for walking around with your broken phlangy. How could anyone live like that? You must not be a normal person, there's something wrong with you. Why would anyone choose to have a broken phlangy when there's a club, right there, that can fix it for you? Everyday you hear people talking about how awful it must be to have a broken phlangy, and how grateful they are that they got their phlangy fixed.

Does it sound silly?

I hear this argument, literally, every day. Only they don't call it a phlangy - they call it a soul.

I don't believe I have a soul - at least not in the way a religious person does. I believe that there are things deep in our subconscious that cause us to behave in certain ways and to appreciate art and beauty, but I do not believe in some part of me that was created when I was born and will live on after me when I die.

Religious people, please keep this in mind when you are trying to convert me to whatever doctrine you follow. You may know how to save my soul - but you're offering to fix something I don't believe I have. And as silly as the phlangy club might sound to you, you sound infinitely sillier to me.

The Best Letter Ever

Today, I received the most amazing letter of my life. Seriously. My acceptance letter from Hogwarts comes in a distant second.... a distant second.

The letter in question is from the Republican National Committee. No, I'm not a Republican. I urge you, no I command you to click on these images and read the full thing.


I was laughing so hard I was crying by the fourth "paragraph". I mean, I was lying across the table clutching the pages in my hand with tears streaming. I have never been so profoundly entreated before in my life. I shall not, Mr Chairman "desert my Party, and walk away from my conservative principles." Also, does everyone capitalize 'Party'? 'Cause I find that a little 1984.

Please stick with me... this letter gets so much better.



So apparently, there is non-stop, swooning coverage of Obama by the ultra-biased media. (If you didn't read it, let me inform you that is almost word for word what the second "paragraph" says.) Who are these media people? I know that the media gives him some leeway, but they do the same for every new president. Political parties Parties have very short memories it seems. I recall quite clearly the first seven months or so of the W administration, do you?

Wherever that non-stop, swooning channel is, I want to find it so I can run it 24-7.


Oh yeah, this is the page where the RNC accuses the Democrats of having "an agenda that is dictated by, and benefits, the special interests that bankroll their election campaigns."

...


...


BWA HA HA HA HA!


(Or on a more eloquent note... Pot? There's a Kettle on line one for you.)


No, just... no

"We have been on the defensive as the Democrats in Congress put partisan politics in front of the best interests of the nation, attacked our leaders with personal smears, and saturated the media with propaganda."

The hell? You know, there's a part of me that says: "Honestly, this letter could have come from either party if you replace Democrat with Republican and liberal with conservative," but I have a hard time believing that the Democratic party would ever put out something this puerile. Not that we're above it, but that it's way too silly and possibly offensive.


The questionnaire just pissed me off. Who worded these questions? I actually wrote next to one: "If the Democratic policies are enacted it is possible that puppies will be kicked. Do you agree with this policy of puppy-kicking? Think of the puppies." That's how badly these questions are railroading you.




I'm going to switch to the Republican Party if they regularly send out this kind of hilarity.



Uh, totally kidding about the Hogwarts letter. Yes, yes I was.

Agnostics

Okay, I just want to vent for a moment. If you don't want to read religious related ranting, don't go further.

I have a real problem with people who call themselves Agnostic and try to justify it by saying that they are somehow being more logical than Atheists. The best example of this is a quote from a self-professed agnostic,

"My personal stance is the doctrine of Agnosticism. Because one can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a higher power, I don’t ascribe to Atheism, the belief that there is no God. Nobody knows with certainty, and as a skeptic I feel it’s silly to profess an unsubstantiated belief either way."

-Alpha Dominance
in what otherwise was an interesting article

Are you f'in kidding me?

If you believe that there are fundamental truths about the universe that can never be known, fine. Life, love, happiness, you get down with your bad self. But the existence of a deity is no different than the existence of unicorns. And if someone told you that since we can never know for sure whether unicorns exist and are therefore unicorn-agnostic you would laugh in their face.

Atheists are not going out on a limb here. With absolutely no evidence in support of a deity, we can state with a reasonable amount of certainty that there is no deity. This is not an unsubstantiated belief. Lack of evidence for something is still evidence, just for the opposite claim. If you cannot substantiate your belief in god, then I can use the lack of evidence as evidence that there is no god.

There is no evidence for the existence of unicorns; I do not believe in unicorns.
There is no evidence for the existence of Santa Claus; I do not believe in Santa Claus.
There is no evidence for the existence of the Loch Ness Monster; I do not believe in the Loch Ness Monster.
There is no evidence for the existence of God; I do not believe in God.
Do you see what I did there?

I do not feel any need to qualify any of those statements with a disclaimer about how we can never know for sure one way or the other, so in fact I am a unicorn/ Santa Claus/ Loch Ness Monster/ God agnostic.

Honestly, I think you're silly for calling yourself an agnostic just because you think that belief in god is held to a different standard than belief in anything else. If you call yourself an agnostic in relation to god, then I don't ever want to hear you say that you do not believe in something. From this day forward you are faery agnostic, bigfoot agnostic, and vampire agnostic.

It's all or nothing.

(Of course, if you call yourself unicorn/ Santa Claus/ Loch Ness Monster agnostic then more power to you. I'm cool with that.)