Random Linking!

Super Columbine Massacre RPG! I've talked about it before, but for whatever reason I never bothered to link it (or for that matter, to download it and try it myself. I'm not sure if I want to (I'm actually not sure if I can on my computer...) but I'll give it a spin over Summer break I bet.

Haloid

It's a mashup of Halo and Metriod! Wow, it's well made, though a REAL fan-wank. I love the fact that Master Chief can jump around like Neo. Never mind the fact that half of the choreography in that movie is ripped directly from the Matrix, almost frame for frame (bullet time and everything, synched up to the music even), just the idea that Master Chief could ever preform such an acrobatic maneuver is laughable. Halo is a first person shooter - you look forward, occasionally you jump. You don't do midair cartwheels, or kung fu melee combat, or THROW FRIGGING CARS AROUND. >_< I'll give Samus the benefit of the doubt on her moves - she actually DOES flip around in the games, but the whole time I was just expecting Master Chief to come out on top, simply because the video was obviously made by a huge Halo fan, more-so than a Metroid fan, anyway. I give it an A for effort, as far as the animation goes, but in terms of what you animated... HD Pong is still Pong, and Blu-Ray clarity on the Pokemon movie is still the Pokemon movie. Bleh.

I've also been watching The Power of Nightmares, a documentary on the rise of both NeoConservatives in America and Islamic Terrorists in the Middle East, and how both parties use fear and scare-tactics to attempt to control the masses. I think Grand Moff Tarkin said it best:

Governor Tarkin: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
General Tagge: But that's impossible. How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?
Governor Tarkin: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

If you're not afraid of something by now, you're not paying attention. The trick is to not be afraid of what they tell you to fear, but rather the ones who use fear to their advantage. Fear them, and do everything in your power to stop them.

I had a weird rant planned out, but the gist is a hypothetical situation. The Union lost the Civil War, and was eventually conquered by the Confederacy. For the next 140 years America was ruled by a tyrannical dictatorship until the European Powers decided to "spread democracy," expecting that freed Americans would all be the same, not noticing the differences between Red- and Blue-Staters, and then violence broke out between the two groups and.. well, anyway, that's what Iraq is like.

Lets do it again! In Iran this time, okay?

Disaster

YouTube's been frustrating me lately. There's a video there where Bill O'Reilly and and Geraldo Rivera have a shouting match over immigration. It's pretty nuts stuff. I always thought of Geraldo as Bill's little buddy, after the way the two of them went after Comedy Central's fake news. But to see these people so angry over this... It's just frightening. My thoughts are that Geraldo was right (they're disagreeing; I HAD to side with one of them): the death of a girl to a drunk driver should not be used as a political springboard about immigration. Yes, Bill, he shouldn't have been here. And I'm sure that after this event, he's been deported. (If not, then shockingly, Bill's right too - immigration policy is a mess.) But to turn a tragedy for this family into a "Talking Points Memo" does a disservice to everyone involved.

Anyway, I looked on YouTube for some more videos of him. I'm still looking for the bastion of literate, smart, Bill O'Reilly fans. I'm sure they're out there. They must be. There's no way there's not at least one Bill O'Reilly fan-site out there. If you find it, please let me know.

Anyway, a lot of the videos I found dealt with the anti-War protesters. Bill doesn't seem to like them that much. But they got me thinking. What the hell do we do now in the Middle East? I think it's pretty clear that the war was started somewhat unjustly. "Iraq is arming WMD's." Not so. "Freedom is on the march." Just as long as they vote in the guys we like, right? The insurgents don't get to be free. So now the only justification for the War is "We had to get rid of Saddam."

You'll often hear conservatives criticize the Anti-War crowd with the jab "Would you prefer it if Saddam were still in power?" And they love to compare him to Hitler, even if the comparison is merely implied. I'm going to take a giant flying leap here and say the following: "I THINK EVERYTHING WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF SADDAM WERE STILL IN POWER." As politicians are now finding out, the population of Iraq is not as streamlined as, say, China, or Japan, or even the vastly divided United States. Inside of the European-drawn borders of Iraq, we have found the warring Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. And these guys HATE each other. So, why then, are we just now noticing this? Saddam kept them in line.

Metaphor time: Saddam was like a barbed knife, plunged in the chest of Iraq. Yeah, its bad. Its a fucking knife plunged in there. But you don't just rip it out. That makes things worse. The same thing happened here. Saddam kept three waring factions from killing each other through fear. Yeah, it's bad, but the alternative was worse. Obviously, the answer is "don't take out the knife". For whatever reason, people now-a-days don't want to admit they messed up. And because they believe they did the right thing, they refuse to accept that things aren't going well. Their logic flows such that doing a good thing = getting good results. And that makes perfect sense. Except, they DIDN'T do a good thing. They made a bad thing worse.

So, step one, then, in fixing this mess, is admitting that mistakes were made. Admit that removing Saddam was not the right solution. Maybe not publicly, but at least to yourselves. Realize that there IS a civil war going on in Iraq. You are not just fighting a small resistance group in its final throws. Once you move more in line with reality, it will be that much easier to fix the problems of reality.

Okay, theres an hour I'm never getting back. Time for homework.