Sep. 15th, 2012

silveradept: The emblem of Organization XIII from the Kingdom Hearts series of video games. (Organization XIII)
Up top, the positive parts! A judge tossed the Wisconsin law that removed collective bargaining rights from public employees, saying that it violated both the state and federal Constitutions. Elsewhere, a judge injuncted the Iowa Secretary Of State's insistence that the voter rolls must be purged and anonymous accusations of voter fraud be allowed, considering how close it is to election season, and the likely impact of such a purge on the voting rolls of minority voters.

Out in the world today, a substantial amount of violence in the Middle East initially believed to be based on a movie. That resulted in the death of the United States ambassador to Libya. When exposed to scrutiny, the idea of the violence being based on the movie falls apart. And investigations confirm the Libya attack was a millitant strike instead of a protest gone out of control. So, the idea that the movie is anything but a man involved in some very shady business pretty well takes up the remaining room left. It's an American Coptic Christian, wanting Muslims to get mad and attack. Afterward, several demonstrations against the violence in Libya, but also more demonstrations around embassies in several Middle Eastern countries, mostly based on the lie that the United States somehow endorsed the video by not yanking it and censoring it. There's something to be said about learning how not to get trolled...but at the same time, it's the responsibility of the trolls not to troll, whether for the evulz or for the lulz. And then there's the Republican Party doing their best to make it sound like this is somehow Obama's fault, that Secretary of State Clinton is secretly aiding Muslims in taking over the United States, or that the President did something he did not do. That's with a very big foreign policy and national security failure within recent memory.

Elsewhere, in a lot sillier affairs, theatre ninjas that make sure the moviegoing experience is undisturbed by talking.

A thing to remember - preach the Scriptures. Use words where necessary. A story of a nun that gave up her habit because the men no longer followed the religion and refused to change. Elsewhere, remember your intersectionality - feminism and other attempts to advance the cause of minorities are not restricted to the majority of that minority.

Also, (ware: mention of pedophilia and child molestation) it is not journalism to simply repeat the words of a man who had sex with a seven year-old girl. Nor to imply that she consented to such. The apologia is the very troubling part of all of this, as well as the focus on the molestor to the near-exclusion of the victim.

Ah, and there's also all the Republican excuses to say that your sexual assault, should it happen to you, isn't really a sexual assault and all the religious colleges that normally covered contraception before someone decided it was an affront to their beliefs because the government was forcing them to cover it.

And there's the war on women's health clinics. Virginia's Governor Ultrasound had a law passed specifically to force clinics that provided women's health services to close or undergo costly renovations. The Board of Health adopted proposed regulations that would exempt already existing clinics from the new regulations. Upon hearing this, The Attorney General of Virginia refused to allow the Board of Health to grandfather in old clinics from the new regulations, claiming they had exceeded their charter, and threatened to not represent them should they be sued over the matter. Having been told how they would do their jobs, the Board of Health passed regulations that did not include the grandfathering.

Last out, spam doesn't make much money. But it costs even less, so it can still be profitable. If there's a way of raising the cost of spamming to make their margins go away, it would help get rid of a lot of spam.

Domestically: When watching a movie abotu gun safety, it is probably a bad idea to be handling a gun.

Man makes racist, white supremacist remark about not wanting a black person to bag his groceries, finds himself banned from store, sues that his religious beliefs have been violated. Claims to be a practicioner of the Vedas. Color everyone else around unimpressed.

Teachers in Chacago Public Schools strike for a better contract with regard to wages, wanting more truth in evaluations, and in the discretino of principals on how to pick their education teams. the teachers claim that a lot of the ideas trying to reform the school system place the blame on them for what are systematic problems.

Article says that secular giving favors those libruls, but total giving, including church giving, favors the Bible Belt. Religious interpretation - Religious people and states are more generous than those secular types. Excepting that giving to your church as a tithe may or may not be considered "charity" as much as obligation. Y'know, two copper coins compared to large sums of money from one's excess and such. (Plus, how much of that donated money is actually used in church charity?) And that's before you get to the amount of people, even religious people, who will lie about their charitable giving, inflating their percentages.

In science and technology, the possibility that self-control is not finite, but that we react to stimuli and rewards differently.

Apple winning its lawsuits against Samsung means differentiation on the market...but also might mean a lot of settlement money for Apple. Also, that jury trials in complex matters should really stress the "peers" part means "people who are reasonably expected to be able to understand what is actually going on".

The most iridescent and shiny fruit currently discovered.

A layperson's explanation as to why multi-core processing is both hard and the way of The Future.

Footage from a nuclear test in space - big bomb goes boom...and we learned about the EMP effects of nuclear detonations to some degree, as well.

Remapping the world in various ways and media and then looking at hurricanes from a particular perspective shows...a hurricane.

And out of this section, using EEGs and particular images to pluck passwords and PINs from people's brains. By using the "pink elephant" trick, no less. Inception looks less like science fiction now... did we also mention a forensic test that's reasonably accurate at being able to determine a suspects eye and hair color, based on DNA evidence?

Last out - One Hundred Things about the Lord of the Rings films, the return of the DeLorean...as an electric vehicle, and using the cards and their effects of Magic: The Gathering to build a simple Turing machine. Which is awesome, in ways that I don't even know because I don't actually understand most of it, but the idea of being able to "compute" using the effects of various cards is just...impressive.
silveradept: The emblem of the Heartless, a heart with an X of thorns and a fleur-de-lis at the bottom instead of the normal point. (Heartless)
So, I saw some movies recently. And I have Thoughts on some of them. Before that, though - there's a love meme going on - here's my thread. To nominate your own or examine the index, follow this link instead.

I have seen two movies with Justin Timberlake as the lead. His acting career appears to be at least as successful as his music career. That said, the first movie (Friends With Benefits) had all the hallmarks of being a glorious subversion and/or lampshade hanging on the tropes of a romantic comedy...and then it played all the tropes entirely straight in the second half of the movie. Which lowered my opinion of it considerably.

In Time was better - it chose to give us The Prince and The Pauper instead. One thing that bothered me, though - it's too easy to transfer time between people. Living with things for as long as they have, the best they've come up with is...bodyguards? Obviously, polite society doesn't steal time, but one would think there would have been security protocols or equipment built by someone sufficiently paranoid.

I watched the Hunger Games movie. I think The Capitol would be proud of it as a production. They left out some very important things, like the significance of mockingjays, or the salute, or a lot of other things that would have made more sense with a little context. (At this point, I've only read up through the Reaping - even so, I could tell we were in for a rough ride.) And, in hunting for their preferred rating to market the movie, PG-13, the filmmakers turned a story of brutal horror and suppression and children killing each other into an Action Girl movie. While some deaths happened on-screen, none of them (that I recall) involved the spilling of blood (an arrow, an insect swarm, a broken neck). The ones performed with blades and things likely to bleed happened off-screen - even one where there was a splashing of blood on the area, but again, the death part was mostly sanitized, with the gory bits happening conveniently out of frame. I would assume that the watchers in the various districts are not spared things like that. But we are, because our movie media industry doesn't want us to think too hard about the idea of children killing children for the entertainment of some. If we did that, we might start thinking about whether we really want to see that kind of thing.

Funny enough, the book trilogy made #3 on the banned/challenged list for 2011. Apparently, textual depictions of child violence, poverty, and dystopian living were sufficient for people to complain that it is unsuited to the agegroup it was published for, but visual depictions of the same? Entirely okay, and mostly sanitized, anyway.

Take a look at the banned/challenged list this year - you'll see a lot of "sexuality" and a lot of "unsuited to age group" and a little bit of "religious viewpoint". Textual depictions of these things are unacceptable for would-be censors, and illustrations of the same are definitely Not Okay... but we get farther along than many of those challenged books in the movies without getting explicit, with real people in the movies...and that's apparently okay. Consistency would be nice, sometimes...

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silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
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