Tuesday, November 22, 2005

What the "deleted scenes" mean...

A cursory examination of some popular Hollywood DVD's show some interesting things you probably did not get to see for some reason or another.
First, the film "Sideways" where a pair of dudes drive in NorCal and get drunk on wine and have human collisions with the opposite sex. One deleted scene borders on the blasphemous, sacriligious and the subversive. That is where one of the characters tosses the Gideon bible he finds in the motel room drawer into the garbage can! While the director claimed it was to speed up the pacing of the film, I can only imagine what the real reason was. Angry mobs protesting in front of the theaters urging a boycott, an invective-laden letter writing campaign orchestrated by Fox News and the Rev. Pat Robertson, and the possibility that the idea would spread amongst the athiests, agnostics and other free thinkers and bibles would disappear in a rapture-like spree. The next deleted scene that was probably not cut in order to speed things up since it was so very short was where they are in their car outside a pharmacy and each of the male lead characters takes 2 Vicodin and wash it down with some Pinot Noir! Better living through chemistry baby! I am sure this vignette of real life would have caused another spectacular letter writing campaign from the likes of the American Pharmacological Institute or whomever takes offense at the misuse of their products...

NEXT! The scary-weird "Donnie Darko" where in many of the deleted scenes his shrink tells him not to worry about going off of his meds, since they are in fact PLACEBOS! Yay! Huh? So, uh, he wasn't crazy after all??? Hmmm... that does change things...

After that, I got a blast out of seeing the deleted scene in "Black Hawk Down" where the Delta Force guys are in the wrong target building (another mil-spec SNAFU along the lines of bombing the Chinese Embassy in downtown Belgrade Serbia due to a map mix-up... yeah, right!) and their Ranger pals see armed silhouettes in the windows and start throwing some US Grade A lead their general direction in a brief but wildly hairy friendly fire incident that just must have "slowed down the pacing of the film", etc... Earlier on in the movie we saw the palpable friction between these two units when the Rangers were shown to be jealous of the Delta Force team having shot a wild boar and made it into an ersatz BBQ. I guess there is no reason to water down this, look what those "skinnies" did to us flag-waving morality tale, with any messy details that would show our military to be fratricidal and/or incompentent, right? Right.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Scooter Scape Goat

Does it seem remotely strange that Scooter was only indicted after he testified to Federal Prosecutors that he learned about Plame's identity from the vice-president. Suddenly he was indicted and the entire neo-con spin community turned on him. Sacrificial lamb perhaps? Punishment for disloyalty?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/25/cia.leak.probe.ap

Xenophobia - People Like Us

During the cold war we thought of the soviets as cogs in a great colorless, flavorless, totalitarian dystopia. We were astounded when Gorbachev broke the frost with Glasnost and we discovered that most soviets were actually just ordinary people with common sense leading simple existences who just wanted a decent life for themselves and their children. The world breathed a sigh of relief.

In the period between the end of the cold war and the war on terrorism the atmosphere in America was permeated with a kind of shell shocked mixture of hope and joy that truly the apocalypse had not come and the earth would continue to spin gracefully around the sun. And yet, in America there was a slight undercurrent of nameless tension, a casting about for a new enemy because truly we had forgotten how to live in peace- if we had ever known.

It is my sincerest hope that we will remember that people in the Middle East are not cogs in some great faceless illogical terror but are in fact ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, trying to get by somehow and create a better future for their children. I hope that we will remember that the Middle East is the cradle of civilization, a place rich with culture, and filled with highly literate, sophisticated and evolved people from many races, religions and viewpoints.

Is the President a Child Pornographer?

Please read the below article from the Associated Press. If the account below is to be believed, the president in his capacity as Commander-In-Chief used our tax dollars to rape children in Iraq and videotape these crimes. If this is true the president is a child pornographer, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and should be placed on the sex offender registry.

How could it possibly come to this? Isn't the President always talking about protecting children? No child left behind? Protect unborn children?

How can we ever expect the world to forgive us?

Judge Orders Release of Abu Ghraib Photos By Greg Mitchell Published: September 29, 2005 12:45 PM ET

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001218842

The Federalist Society

The Federalist Society is an insidious group bent on weakening the American Government from the inside out. They seek to undermine our government by placing members of the Federalist Society in positions of power

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0003.landay.html

so that they can weaken our government's ability to protect the populace from social, economic and environmental injustice. See below links to practice groups working toward these ends:

http://www.fed-soc.org/Publications/practicegroupnewsletters/civilrights/news2004.htm
http://www.fed-soc.org/Publications/practicegroupnewsletters/environmentallaw/news2003.htm
http://www.fed-soc.org/Publications/practicegroupnewsletters/labour&employment/news2004.htm

This is a scourge more frightening than the Communist threat of the cold war in that these individuals do not fear notice. They are upstanding, flag waving hypocrites. If the American people were to treat them according to their own right wing standards of decency, there would be a House Committee on Un-American Activities whose express goal is to ferret out these dangerous subversives.

See their propaganda below:

http://www.fed-soc.org/ourpurpose.htm

With missionary zeal they want to change the views and beliefs of lawmakers and academicians. This is counter to the beliefs of our founding fathers who wanted more than anything else to found a country in which people were free to believe as they chose and speak their mind.

Moreover, with the growth of globalization, they have formed a "watch group" to monitor international groups, many of whose express purpose is oriented toward social action to make the world a better place. http://www.ngowatch.org/

Largely, they are concerned that making the world a better place might make it harder to run their businesses and infringe on their right not to care if the world is a better place or not.

I Have a Dream

What would I fight and die for?

A world of joyous creativity where each person is honored for the unique gift that they bring into the world. A world of relaxed laughter where people do not know fear or want or worry. A place where we learn from each other, where we contribute our own unique gifts and work from bliss and calling not from exploitation, fear or greed. A world where people do not fear freedom of expression but welcome the learning that different perspectives bring. A place of hope, love and support in difficult times. A place of joy, exuberance and sharing in times of prosperity. We have been given all the wealth, resources and intelligence we need to create this world, so why don't we?