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I’ve never been to a movie theater and not been able to watch the movie I paid for.  I know it happens (a couple times at least to my younger brother), but I think don’t go to the movies enough for this to be a usual occurrence.  But just that happened when Jen and I went to the Palladium in San Antonio to see Toy Story 3 (in IMAX 3D nontheless); apparently the film got stuck in the projector (which was funny because all through the ads they played up the “all digital projection”), and the showing was cancelled.  The staff gave us free passes and also said we could go to any other showing of our choice.  Since we haven’t had cable TV since moving (and I don’t watch the local channels), I had no idea what else was playing.  After going through a few movies I hadn’t heard of, the staff member mentioned The Last Exorcism.  I had just heard about a viral marketing campaign for this movie on This Week in Tech, so Jen and I decided to check out this movie since it would get us out in time to eat lunch before Scott Pilgrim.

Neither of us had any idea what to expect going into this film, and I think that helped.  Normally, this is a movie that I would pass on in the theaters, since on th surface it’s a collection of cliches.  First, it’s another exorcism horror movie, which has probably not been done better than The Exorcist back in 1973.  Second, it’s another fake documentary horror movie ala The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity. And to a certain extent it doesn’t rise above these cliches.  Much of what you see are things you would expect to see, such as the possessed girl vomiting (although non-projectile) and running around in the dark with a camera.  But I think that the filmmakers took their audience’s familiarity with the tropes of these genres into account, and it is here that this film becomes interesting.

The central character of the movie is Cotton Marcus, an evangelical preacher well known for rousing (if superficial) sermons, a theatrical flair, and performing exorcisms.  He began preaching as a kid under the tutelage of his preacher father, and performed his first exorcism at ten.  He no longer believes in God, however, and has just been going through the motions for years.  Even though the exorcisms he performs are elaborate hoaxes, the news story of the death of an autistic boy during a botched exorcism has convinced him to give up exorcisms and expose them as  hoaxes with the hope of dissuading others.  To this end he hires a documentary crew to film his last exorcism.

The suspension of disbelief is a necessity for the audience in any movie, and when The Last Exorcism keeps its main theme (belief) in the foreground, it’s at its best.  Throughout most of the movie, Marcus, his film crew and the audience struggle with what they believe is happening.  Is the girl actually possessed?  Is her father somehow involved or responsible?  These questions are raised constantly during the movie, and I thought this was a good way to play with the cliches and include the audience in the movie.

Unfortunately it is just in that suspension of disbelief that the movie falls flat.  After raising so many questions about the existence of the supernatural, something that is done very slowly and deliberately, the ending felt like it came out of nowhere.  For just that reason, I just didn’t believe it at the time.  I do think that some of the plot holes can be filled in after thinking about them for a bit, and both Jen and I found it interesting enough to talk about all through lunch and later.  But I also think that the movie still didn’t do enough to convince me that the ending is what should have (or even could have) happened.

(or Why the Electoral College Works and Why the National Popular Vote “Movement” is a Sham)

Originally posted at DeTocqueville.US: http://www.detocqueville.us/2010/08/why-the-electoral-college-works/

I suppose it should come as no surprise given their love of centralized control, that many liberals have been recently calling for a national, popular election for president rather than the current Electoral College system.  But this recent trend is a great example of how little people understand the Constitution as well as how little respect for it the Left really has.

Six states have already passed measures that would bypass the constitutionally-mandated Electoral College system.  Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick had this to say when he signed the measure into law earlier this week:

“I am proud to join other states in this effort to bring more voters and more states into the presidential campaign process,” the Democratic governor said in a statement. “Voter participation in all 50 states is critical to the strength of our democracy and the national popular vote movement will bring more voters into the fold and ensure that every vote counts.”

from http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/08/mass_governor_p.html

There are several fallacies in Gov. Patrick’s statement, but let’s first examine why the Electoral College exists before we get into those problems.

One of the key issues at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was how to maintain the balance between the big-population states and the small-population states.  The Great Compromise was the solution to this in the Legislative branch.  This created a bicameral legislature composed of a House of Representatives that would be based on population (thus pleasing large states like Virginia and New York) and a Senate with two members appointed from each state regardless of size (thus pleasing small states like Georgia and Rhode Island).  It should be clear why such a compromise was necessary (as well as why the debate prior to this was so heated and took so long).  The large states didn’t want their citizens deprived of influence by being lumped together with the same representatives as a small state, but the small states didn’t want to join into a union that would roll over all of their concerns by majority rule.

This illustrates two of the foundation principles of the Constitution: majority rule with minority rights and federalism.  What many people may not understand is that the Electoral College also protects these very same principles by ensuring that the president was not chosen by a popular vote but by an Electoral College.  The members of the Electoral College are chosen by the state legislatures, and the numbers correspond to the number of Senators and Representatives each state has in Congress.

It should be pointed out that according to the Constitution:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

This means that technically, these states are well within their rights to decide to throw their electors to the national popular vote winner, but constitutionality does not mean this is a good thing to do.  So to illustrate that let’s look at the problems with Gov. Patrick’s statement.

First, he says that “this [is an] effort to bring more voters and more states into the presidential campaign process.”  This statement is historically inaccurate; the Electoral College system, in fact, ensures that presidential candidates cannot ignore small states.  I know some of us in large states (I’m in Texas) lament the amount of attention lavished on Iowa and New Hampshire during the presidential primary season.  However, a popular vote model (even with the facade of the Electoral College) would encourage candidates to ignore low-population states in favor of area of high-population density.  The effect of this would be the opposite of what Gov. Patrick states.

Second, he says “the national popular vote movement will bring more voters into the fold and ensure that every vote counts.”  Again, this is fallacious on several levels.  As stated above, the Electoral College system avoids marginalizing the concerns of small states (there’s that protection of minority rights), but still gives each state representation based on population with the number of electoral votes per state (there’s majority rule).  Thus, each vote still counts and areas of the country that aren’t California and New York are still considered, are still important.  The Electoral College system already does what Gov. Patrick claims a national system would do.

Finally, let’s look at the method by which these six states are trying to “bring more voters into the fold and ensure that every vote counts,” because it is here that the great lie to this national popular vote “movement” can be found.  These states have decided that they will pledge their electors to support the winner of the popular vote.  The effect of this is not to give each vote equal measure, but to actually disenfranchise voters in those states.  For example, if Candidate A receives more of the popular vote nationally, but Candidate B receives more of the popular vote in the state, Massachusetts’s electors would go not to the candidate that her voters chose (Candidate B) but to Candidate A.

How does disregarding the voters in your state “ensure that every vote counts”?!  This is ridiculous sophistry, and Gov. Patrick (as well as the other governors who signed similar measures) has done his fellow citizens a great disservice: he has taken their voice and shackled it to the national sentiment, regardless of how they vote.

If these states and others really wanted a popular-vote system that actually represented their voters, they would pledge their electors in a proportional model, not this sham.  Instead they show their true intentions by disenfranchising voters while claiming to do the opposite.  We already have a model that does what they claim to do; let’s let it work for us.

Inspired by President Obama’s “success” at the nuclear summit last week, I thought I’d share these TV spots from 1965 on surviving nuclear fallout for farmers and rural residents.  As a plus, it uses marionettes!  Yay!

By the way, apparently you can just peel an apple covered by radioactive fallout, and it’s perfectly safe to eat.  Just be careful to dispose of the peel correctly; it’s still radioactive!

[Note: If you're reading this on Facebook, check out the post on R&G here, or the original video from the Internet Archive here.]

From Boing Boing: Big Content’s dystopian wish-list for the US gov’t: spyware, censorship, physical searches and SWAT teams

When George Orwell wrote 1984, he was primarily attacking Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union and warning the rest of the world against following a similar path.  It should be remembered, however, that Orwell also foresaw the possibility of that world coming about not just through communism of the Soviet variety, but also through a combination of large corporations and government.  This story from Gizmodo (which I heard about on the podcast Buzz Out Loud at Cnet, and which originally came from Boing Boing) is fittingly accompanied by a picture from the 1950s movie of the book.

These two organizations have consistently used their influence with many congressmen (and, I know this will come as a shock, those congressmen’s ignorance) to further their own agenda at the expense of our rights of ownership and unwarranted search and seizure.  They have persuaded the government to negotiate copyright treaties in secret, without public oversight, and now they are going even further, enlisting ISPs to spy on their customers and asking for software that could scan users’ computers.

I know this sounds a bit alarmist, but this is the sort of thing we criticize the Communist government of China for doing.  The Bill of Rights protects us from the federal and state governments’ overreaching their power, but we (as a people, not a government) need to keep a critical eye on these large corporations.  This is not capitalism; this is not a free market.  This is corporate welfare of the worst sort.

I was listening to The Dana Show Podcast, and Dana Loesch brought up the FCC/Comcast decision, in which the court decided that the FCC did not have the power to regulate Comcast regarding the latter’s restrictions on certain types of Internet traffic (BitTorrent traffic in this specific case).  On the show she had Michelle Moore from Smart Girl Politics, who explained “net neutrality” simply as the federal government trying to control the Internet.  Since I’ve seen some similar comments from others in recent months, I think it’s important that we look at the different facets of this issue.

As far as Ms. Loesch and Ms. Moore go, they are correct.  The FCC’s attempts to gain more power for itself (outside of Congress’s mandate) and the calls for more government regulation of the Internet are a bad thing.  Unfortunately, their description of net neutrality in just these terms mischaracterizes the issue.  I’ve been following this for years, and I think we need to spell out the issue completely to understand it.

We can approach net neutrality in two different ways.   Loesch and Moore look at this way: companies should treat every application (Skype, http, bittorrent, whatever) exactly the same.  So from this perspective, an ISP cannot give more priority to Skype (which uses a lot of bandwidth) than it does to a basic webpage.  From this perspective, net neutrality doesn’t make any sense, because ISPs would be unable to manage their network to give users a smooth experience.  And they’re right; this doesn’t make any sense.

But this isn’t the only way to look at it.  Now imagine that an ISP (say, Comcast for instance) buys a TV network (crazy, I know), and that they decide, “Hey, you know that competing TV network?  What if we slow their traffic down so that users have a bad experience on their website, but we give more priority to our own offering?”  So Comcast buys NBC, and then shapes their traffic so that visitors to CBS or ABC have their traffic slowed, while traffic to NBC or Hulu is prioritized.

I’m all for companies making their own business decisions, and if they feel they need to do traffic-shaping, that’s  cool.  I also understand the idea of giving themselves an advantage.  But there’s a couple problems with all this.

First, this all needs to be done upfront.  I’m not that interested in the traffic-shaping for network stability, but if Comcast is going to give priority to something, we need to know that upfront.  Second, there’s very little real competition in the ISP space.  What this means is that if I, as a customer, don’t like what Comcast is doing, I have very few choices about going somewhere else.  And without choice, the customer cannot put pressure on the company to get what they want.  This situation, by the way, was created by government intervention, a legacy of the old monopolies of the cable and phone companies.

So what’s the answer?  For the conservative, I think it’s clear.  We cannot trust the government to regulate net neutrality, but we also need to expand competition by further getting the government and corporate welfare out of the way.  This way companies will be forced to compete, and the Internet can remain truly neutral.

Coraline is one of my favorite books for children, in large part because Neil Gaiman has a cleverness to his writing and imagination that lend themselves to such books. I find that such cleverness lends itself to children’s entertainment, especially those that can appeal to both children and adults (such as the Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons of old, or Animaniacs). Gaiman’s worlds are unique, and his prose is full of turns-of-phrase that I love, little ways of describing things that sound good to the ear and read well on the page.

When I heard that Coraline was going to be made into a feature film, I was very excited, and I enjoyed seeing the first trailer for it in the theater. I was, to be sure, annoyed that Gaiman’s name was not giving top or second billing in that trailer; in fact, he wasn’t even mentioned. Instead, the chief name was that of Henry Sellick.

If the name Henry Sellick is not familiar to you, that’s primarily because one of his best works is usually ascribed to Tim Burton: The Nightmare Before Christmas. While Burton was involved in the creation and production, much of the work, including the direction, was done by Sellick. That film is a perfect example of what I mentioned above: a clever, quirky children’s story that appeals to adults as well, and giving the tone of Nightmare, Selllick was a good choice for the creator and director of Coraline as a film.

However, after having finally watched it, I have to admit that I am, to a certain extent, disappointed.

And, I kinda feel bad about that.

See, I think Coraline is, independent of the source material, a good film. Henry Sellick makes fine, living, colorful worlds with interesting characters. I enjoyed the performances of all the voice actors: Teri Hatcher is great as the mother and other mother, John Hodgman’s father is, although not British (a small quibble I won’t mention again) spot on, and Keith David’s cat is appropriately smug. Dakota Fanning’s Coraline fits very well, and the others are great.  The film is also beautiful to look at. I haven’t researched how they achieved all of the animation effects, but there’s a wonderful dichotomy between what looks like computer animation and real world textures. Everything has a depth to it, and it’s wonderful to look at. There are scenes that are obviously meant to appeal to those watching the 3D version, but these work appropriately in 2D, and I didn’t feel pulled out of the film because of them.

Given how well everything works, it remains to find a reason for my disappointment. A part of it definitely comes from plot and character differences between the movie and the book, and this is one of those conundrums that fans of any book often find themselves in when it’s adapted to a movie. We want the movie to be exactly like the book, but we understand it cannot be. However, although we understand that it cannot be, we still (however slightly) resent the movie for not being the book. Admittedly, it’s not fair at all, but it’s just the way it is. No matter how much I try, I cannot approach this movie as someone who hasn’t read the book.  So take the following criticisms with a grain (or even a shaker) of salt.

First, I felt the character of Wybie to be completely unnecessary. That’s not to say I don’t understand why Sellick wrote him in (which I suppose to be to give boys a character to identify with and to give Coraline someone her own age to interact with), but I think it was not needed. What he did do was to take screen time away from Coraline’s interactions with the other characters, and I think this was a mistake. Wybie’s presence necessitates that some really great moments (especially between Coraline and the cat) had to be left out for time’s sake, which is, I think, always a problem.

Second, I didn’t care for the reordering of parts of the plot, specifically the number of times Coraline goes to and from the other world. Sellick adds one extra to-and-fro, and I feel this alters the dramatic tension. I think this might be one instance where the 3D imposed itself on the story; perhaps Sellick added one more journey to utilize the tunnel between worlds for the 3D version. Also, Coraline gets locked up with the ghost children earlier here, whereas in the book her parents are already missing and she has gone back to retrieve them. The separation of these events (her going back to get her parents and meeting the ghost children) weakens the story from a dramatic and thematic perspective.

My last criticism is really the reason that I think I was disappointed by Sellick’s Coraline. Although parts of the movie maintain some of the tone of the book, overall the book has a darker tone; the other world is not quite as happy, and there is more of a sense of danger even from the beginning. I suppose some people (perhaps Sellick himself) felt that making the other world lighter made it more appealing to Coraline, but I think this misses a key point of Coraline’s character. She is bored with the real world and craves something more interesting, even if it’s a little dangerous. And this is, for me, a completely believable character trait in a kid. For example, in the movie, Coraline is lured to the door in the drawing room by Mr. Bobo’s jumping mice. Certainly, this makes sense; the jumping mice are very cute. But in the book, Coraline is drawn to the door by hearing it creak open and by seeing a small dark shadow flit out from her room and into the drawing room. While this is much more creepy than Sellick’s version, the fact that Coraline is interested in the shadow and the creaking door fits with her character, and I think it makes her a more interesting and stronger character than just some girl chasing something cute.

Interestingly enough, there is one change in the movie that I think works. I like the way the other mother was portrayed as more like Coraline’s real mother. The reason I think this works is that this accentuates the weirdness of her button eyes, and in this way she comes across more disturbing than if the eyes were just one of many differences.

Given all of that, I did enjoy Sellick’s Coraline. It was fun to watch and continues the tradition of children’s entertainment that adults can enjoy as well.

UPDATE: Having watched the film again, I wanted to comment that I definitely appreciate it more the second time.  I think watching Coraline the first time worked out any disappointments/expectations that I had going in.  Now that all that’s worked out, I can enjoy the film on its own merits.

Quick point about a quote from Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) (from Time magazine, May 18, 2008, p. 24)

“We’re excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice – the list goes on. Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promise land.”

Problems with this quote:

1) Snowe commits one of the greatest offenses of the left: group everybody up instead of treating them as individuals. As a writer, I’m personally offended by her grouping of unlike things, but it is also an ideological problem. First, the young and minorities are two “groups” that have things in common that have little to do with beliefs and ideas. There are conservative young people, liberal young people, and moderate young people. There are conservative minorities, liberal minorities, and moderate minorities. Environmentalism and pro-choice are ideological positions, and they lead us to point two:

2) What is the point of having a political party if there isn’t a common ideology? People that believe and think as the majority of Democrats do should be Democrats. Perhaps Senator Snowe could explain why she’s a Republican? You see, a party cannot represent everyone; if it could, there would only be one political party. Certainly there will be disagreements in a party, but in general those disagreements are not over fundamental ideological principals; otherwise, the party should split, just as the Democratic-Republicans did in the early 1800s.

A large part of point number two is that different people have different priorities. For example, I am pro-life, but that is not my number one consideration in voting for a political candidate. The issue may make a difference in choosing between two candidates who are otherwise very similar, but I am not going to vote for a socialist who happens to be pro-life. If the abortion issue is your primary issue, then you have a clear choice: pro-lifers vote Republican, pro-choicers vote Democrat. Let’s say, however, that someone is more concerned with limiting government spending, lower taxes, greater economic freedom, and national security than they are abortion, but they happen to be, if pressed, pro-choice. This person should (and usually does) vote Republican also because their priorities.

None of this requires that the Republican party change its ideology; it simply needs to know how to get its message out there.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13579055&fsrc=nwl

So Arlen Specter has finally taken off his elephant suit.  It was probably about time; he could never be reliably counted on to actually stop a lot of President Obama and the Democrat’s measures to transform American society.  On many issues, there was often the possibility that he (and a couple other North Eastern Republicans) could go along with the Democrats.  It is no consolation that sometimes he’ll vote with his former party.

This is the second time that a member of the national legislature has switched parties soon after an election.  The last time, Senator Jefferies became an independent rather than totally joining the Democrats, but Jefferies defection had a more immediate impact, changing the way things were done in the Senate.  This time, at least, the defection doesn’t significantly weaken the Republicans.

The above article from the Economist misses a crucial point in its analysis of Specter’s defection.  In such a defection, and in Republican defeats in the North East (for example, there are no longer any Republicans from New England in the House), all the Economist can see is party.  Such an analysis misses out on the ideological aspects of the issue.  In the Republican defeats, all the Economist can see is the weakening of a party.  What it misses, however, is that the Republicans who lost in the North East were all of Specter’s ilk: what Rush Limbaugh and others often call “Democrat Lite.”  They are Republicans who try to win elections by being more like Democrats, rather than Republicans actually running as Republicans.  From a typical voter’s perspective, why would I vote for a Democrat-Lite Republican when I can vote for the real thing?

In the North East and other parts of the country where Democrats have been dominating, the Republican party needs to actually provide an alternative to the Democratic party line.  They need to explain to the American people why they should be elected over Democrats, what they’re going to do differently, and why their ideas will actually work.

The Economist suggests that it is the Republican party moving right that caused Specter’s separation from his state party and subsequent defection.  This, however, has the cause and effect backwards.  It is the Republican party elite’s insistance on moving the party to the left that has caused the loss of North Eastern states: many Conservatives would rather stay home than vote for a liberal Republican, and Democrats aren’t going to vote for a Republican at all.

It is because of this reality that Specter has to change parties: he will no longer be able to win as a Republican, since he was basically a Democrat anyways.

http://www.diddlysquat.tv/theplot.htm

I’m not sure what to think of this. I was listening to the Rush Limbaugh Show today, and Rush mentioned, as he often does, his opinion audit by the Sullivan Group, which showed him to be “almost always right 99% of the time.” I always love comments like this; it’s part of the reason that I like Rush so much. I have a natural sarcastic bent (runs in the family), so I love the use of sarcasm that is done so seemlessly that it throws people into confusion. It often provokes an emotional response that brings out the truth of people’s feelings.

However, there are times that even I cannot quite tell if someone is being sarcastic or not. I did a quick Google search on Rush’s opinion audit, just to see what would come up, and I found the above link to a site called Diddly Squat, purporting to expose Rush’s errors and his plot to “dumb down dittoheads.” The whole “plot” focuses on the Sullivan Group opinion audits, and, in fact, on the phrase “almost always.” The site points out quite right that “almost always” is a meaningless phrase, but then totally gets wrong why that’s important. “Almost always” is purposefully chosen precisely because it points out the sarcasm in what Rush is saying.

What’s funny for me about this is that Leftists and others who can’t stand Rush often strike their foot on the sarcasm. They hate it when he says things like “talent on loan from God” or “serving humanity just by showing up.”  It riles them up in a way that shows their lack of understanding.  Now, it has to be admitted that there are plenty of Conservatives who also lack an understanding of sarcasm and have similar reactions to Leftist commentators, so I’m not suggesting this is just a problem with the Left.  But it’s still funny.

My problem in looking at this site, however, is that I can’t decide if it’s actually serious or not.  I’ve been looking for evidence that the whole thing is just a joke, but the barbs launched at both Rush and President George W. Bush suggest that it’s actually serious.  This is hard for me to believe because I usually assume that people are smart, and the sarcasm, the poking fun at himself, is so obvious in Rush’s delivery that I just can’t see how people don’t get it.  However, sometimes they don’t and some of them are just unhinged enough to create a site like this.

So I leave it to you to get a laugh out of this site for whatever reason you want.  Personally, I’m laughing because I think the guy’s completely insane, and for some reason I think that’s funny.

Nancy Gibbs has an article in Times Magazine for May 4, 2009 (which I just got in the mail today) in which she discusses the idea of Texas seceding from the Union.  This reflection was brought on by Governor Rick Perry stating (I’m quoting from the article)  “he thought the U.S. was still a ‘great union,’ but ‘if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come of that?’”

In her hurry to engage in some standard East-Coast-style jabs at Texans’ pride in their state and moralizing about secession (where she finds it necessary to bring up President Lincoln), Ms. Gibbs misses the larger issue: the relationship between the federal government and the states.  Federalism is, in fact, much more important than Gov. Perry joshing a bit about secession (especially considering that reminiscing about Texas being its own country is basically a state past-time). Read the rest of this entry »