don’t panic

There was an article on Slashdot recently regarding how Steve Soderberg wants to change the way movies are distributed. He states in the article that he wants to shorten the time between the release of theatrical movies and DVDs so that they are released virtually at the same time.

What a great idea.

Oh, sure, the National Association of Theatre Owners is going to be all up in arms, but that’s because they know that most people today would rather watch a movie on their tiny television at home than pay $10 per person to go a crowded, teen-packed mall, only to sit in front of a screen that’s a third the size of the theaters they remember from their youth, listen to morons talking on their cell phones through the entire screening, and have to pay another $30 for a large popcorn, some Milk Duds and a watered down Coke. What a surprise!

Alternately, we can pay $15 and OWN the movie, watch it as many times as we like, in quiet and privacy, at the time of our choosing, and with whatever food and drink we choose.

Is NATO (nice acronym guys…) really that brain dead? Apparently. They’re pushing the “Theater Experience”. Yeah, it’s an experience all right. One that I hope to forget as soon as possible.

Go Steve!

Most of the time I just find the President an obnoxious boob, but lately, with Katrina past us and Bush playing political catch-up, I find that he is the very worst of everything I want in the leader of the free world.

Maybe I just keep reading the wrong quotes from him or something, but it seems like there hasn’t been a fresh word out of his mouth in months. Everything he says could be predicted ahead of time as a means of saving face. Wouldn’t you just love it if instead of trying to find out “what didn’t go right” he would come out and say, “damn, that sure caught us off guard.” Instead of saying “we’ll do whatever it takes to rebuild” he would say, “We can’t afford to cripple the rest of the country to rebuild it all from the ground up, so we’re looking for stepped options.”

The President is always trying to paint a picture of the great United States of Infallibility. But most of the population isn’t completely stupid. We can see how bad it is, and if we can’t, then the media will be sure to show us, again and again and again. But instead of giving us some credit and risking that we might actually forgive an honest appraisal, we are fed nothing but confidence cliches. I want a president that will actually run the country, not try to convince me time and again that everything is under control, and if it isn’t, then they’ll find out who’s at fault and get a committee on it right away.

And I don’t even really want to know. The best administration for me is one that I never hear about. Things just get done.

Yeah, like that’ll ever happen.

Sure, partisan politics makes it impossible… Bull. We have smart people, really freakin’ smart people in this country, and a few might even work for the government (okay, maybe not, but they SHOULD!). Let’s round up a few, pay them a hundred-thousandth of the budget we just approved to rebuild a city that is almost certain to get clobbered in exactly the same way again despite what we do to protect it, and really solve some things. Hell, if we scrapped a carrier or a few B1′s, we could fund a dozen big brains for centuries! What a deal!

Of course, the catch in that plan is that the leaders of our country have to actually listen to the smart guys instead of pretending that they know better.

It blows my mind that he can actually state that the Kyoto Protocol would be too expensive on the US economy and yet sends over 50 billion dollars in vapor money to ONE single (dead) city. Hello, Mr. President… This one is for free. If a natural disaster wipes you out, you get out of Dodge and give it a try someplace else. Let the corporate moguls with the money come in and rebuild over time as demand makes it profitable. All you’re going to do by throwing instant cash at it is to make a slum that no one will really want to live in, but will because it’s free money and makes you look good. It’ll be a bran’ spankin’ new slum, but a slum none the less.

How many Bush staffers does it take to screw in a light bulb? – None. They simply deny that the bulb is burned out.

When I read this article about vandals that broke the windows on 19 school buses in the San Dieguito Union School District, my first response was, “man, we are way too soft on the death penalty.” And these weren’t just any buses, they were for special-education students… Those like my daughter.

I read things like this and it makes me seriously wonder how in the name of God we are going to make it as a planet? Scripturally, we aren’t, but I like to be optimistic. This wasn’t the back of some grocery store that these people vandalized, it was the heart of our education system. What kind of complete idiot does that? Hmmm… I guess one who didn’t think much of (or in) school.

And what kind of punishment should we give someone who does something like this? Throw them in jail for a few months?? They’re a disease. Sequestering them along with your other diseases for a short time isn’t going to solve the problem. When you leave cancer in the body, it kills you. When you leave a cancer like this in society, do we expect it to just go away? If you could do something so mindlessly stupid as to destroy a service that you helped pay for, how is a month in prison going to completely reshape your ethical landscape?

I’ve made this analogy before, but…

In some countries, they used to cut a convicted thief’s hands off. Yes, it’s completely barbaric, but damnitall, it worked. It was an incredible motivation not to become a thief, but it had the added benefit of making it nearly impossible for those convicted to ever do it again.

So many people tell me, “violence isn’t the answer.” Maybe not, but it certainly is the problem, and unless we can find a way to take away a criminal’s hands, we are just encouraging the cancer to infect another part of the body.

I’ve been ranting a lot about our President lately. Of course, he’s easy to rant about. Between the war in Iraq (interesting how we don’t call that the “war on terror” anymore…) and Katrina, he’s had a pretty full plate. Then again, he IS the President, and emergencies are one of the better reasons that his position of employment exists. I mean, if the country was running great, then he would be about as useful as a trap door on a lifeboat.

And darnitall, he isn’t improving my confidence by going on television and telling America that recovery “will take years,” and “We’re dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation’s history,” … “The folks on the Gulf Coast are going to need the help of this country for a long time. This is going to be a difficult road. The challenges that we face on the ground are unprecedented, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to succeed.”

Yeah, okay. No kidding. I’m sitting on my couch watching CNN show houses drifting by and an entire city underwater and the best that the leader of our country, the man “in the know” (or supposed to be) says it’s going to take years to recover. I was hoping for a little more, actually.

And the worst part about this is that he tries to get all serious and sincere when he makes these speeches, like his words are going to go down in history or something. And maybe they will. I’m sure the people in the Superdome will remember for a very long time as they wait day after day in blistering heat and horrid conditions just so they can be packed into buses and shipped off to some other stadium. Granted, that’s probably the best that can be done for them, but you can’t honestly tell me that the United States government, the “most powerful military force on the planet,” can’t mobilize a few dozen big helicopters to get those people the hell out of there. Who cares what it costs. We’re going to loose ten of billions just on the rise in gas prices. And that levee. The Army engineers, with nearly limitless resources and brainpower, couldn’t figure out a way to plug a hole??

It really makes me wonder what would happen should we encounter an emergency that we didn’t see coming for over a week. We knew this was going to be bad, and potentially really bad, so why is help just now reaching the effected areas some three day later? Couldn’t the President have mobilized some of that great military power just in case it actually turned out to be what every weatherman in America predicted? Apparently not. He was too busy at his ranch it seemed. But hey, on the way back to the White House he did manage to fly over the area in his air-conditioned, luxury jet, and he did say he would visit the area… but the trip was “still being coordinated.” My tax dollars at work. I’m sure those folks still stuck in a New Orleans stadium are thinking they’d like to have a little of that “coordination”… Like maybe four days ago.

Oh yeah… Mr. President, this might be a good time to reflect on the fact that this “unprecedented disaster” might just be (yet another) sign that every freaking scientist in the world (save those in the White House) might actually be right when they say that the planet is warming up and extreme weather is just going to get worse. You might want to reconsider your die-hard policy of forking the problem over onto my daughter’s generation instead of playing the front-man for big oil.

Do your damn job, man!