Everyone is allowed to make mistakes from time to time, so long as they learn from them. Even the best of us make mistakes, and in this case the best of us is Steve Jobs. Yes, I am a long-time fan of Steve Jobs. Pretty much every good thing to ever come out of Apple was his idea. Even better, Jobs is responsible for making Pixar the company it is today, having bought the company from Lucasfilm, then partnering with Disney. This is largely what has made Apple the media powerhouse it is today, which includes iTunes. iTunes is not only the best media player available, but it has the easiest user interface I've ever used. It's easy because it's simple and intuitive, but powerful.
But the new version goes too far. When you have a perfect interface, taking buttons away doesn't make it simpler, it makes it more confusing. Also, the convenient colorful interface made navigation easy, but now iTunes is... gray. Just gray. It's surprising what a difference the color made!
So what now? Switch to something else? No thank you. I've used WinAmp, RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player, and even at its worst iTunes is far more powerful and easy to use. But I want my color back!
Here's the good news: You can fix it, partly. Not entirely. If you use Windows, I don't know a solution other than to switch to Mac (but I'm sure there is one); but if you are on MacOSX, it's really easy. Download this file I found and unzip it. Quit iTunes 10 and find it in the Finder, right-click on it, and select "Show Package Contents". Navigate to the "Resources" folder, and move the file named "iTunes.rsrc" to your desktop in case you need it again. There's a new file with the same name in the folder you just downloaded and unzipped; put it in the "Resources" folder where the original file was. Close the windows, and open iTunes back up. It's not a complete fix, but at least the playlist icons are colorful again.
Now I have something else for you guys... What do you think of the new iTunes logo? I hate it. I understand Jobs' reasoning... we're moving beyond CDs, so let's get rid of the CD icon. But the old one was recognizable and iconic. The new one is bland and... Windowsy. Really, the first time I saw it, on a friends laptop, I had no idea it was iTunes. It's not ugly, it's just stupid. So just to rub it in Jobs' face even more, I made my own iTunes logo. What's more obsolete than CDs? 8-tracks, cassette tapes... vinyl! Here is my gift to my readers, my homemade iTunes Vinyl logo:
On a Mac, download the .png and open it in Preview, "Select All" from the "Edit" menu, and "Copy". Find iTunes 10 in the Finder, and "Get Info" from the "File" menu. Click on the lame logo in the upper-left corner of the Info window so it's highlighted, and hit "Command-V" to paste it. The old logo will still be in your dock, but you can drag iTunes out of the dock, then open iTunes, right-click the icon in the dock and select "Keep in Dock".
I think changing icons in Windows is pretty easy, too, but I don't remember the process.
The downside is that you may have to do this again when you update iTunes... but there's hope. One thing I respect about Apple is that the company learns from mistakes. The Windows-looking logo is probably here to stay, but we may get a better interface back. Remember the iPod Shuffle? It's known for being the smallest .mp3 player, but a couple years ago they took it too far. To make it even smaller, they took away the buttons, making it unusable without special headphones. This was a bad move, but Apple learned and the new iPod Shuffle has the old buttons back. So keep hope!
I haven't blogged in almost two months. It's a new record! It makes me think of this, from one of my favorite bloggers, Dan Bergstein:
"[I'm] going to start a blog called "Sorry I Haven't Updated in a While" and it will only feature articles apologizing for not updating more often. Sample: Sorry I haven't updated the blog in a while, but a spider hopped into my mouth, laid eggs, and now I'm pregnant with spiders."
Meanwhile, I've been back at ISU for a month now. This has been/will be a busy semester. I'm focusing on my music minor, which I've just started. That means music theory, which I haven't studied since high school... ten years ago! Music theory. Aural skills (sight singing and dictation, both of which I've been doing on my own for forever so it's easy). Trombone lessons with Dr. Brooks (I'm playing the bass Trombone this semester, and it is so much fun!). Mr. York coerced me to join the marching band by telling me there was a $400 scholarship (there was). So far there are a lot of sentences in this post that end with a statement in parentheses (like this one). In addition to marching band, I'm in the symphonic band, both jazz bands, and a brass ensemble (that's five total ensembles). Busy times! I also have a couple geology projects I'm trying to get done, but time and computer access has been an issue.
That's what's up in brief... enjoy this photo of my now eight-month-old beard!
So, that thing I said I'd post about that was fun instead of political but I needed to go through all the pictures first? Yep. Here it is!
I've blogged before about the excellent air show put on annually in Rexburg, one of the few worthwhile things to see there.
This year they skipped the air show, because the Blue Angels came to Idaho Falls, and no matter how good your show is (Rexburg puts on one of the best), you can't compete with that. So several of the planes that regularly show off in Rexburg were in Idaho Falls, instead. And this time, I had a great camera to capture it all!
I'm going to try doing this a bit differently. Instead of embedding dozens of high-resolution photos in this post, and making the page take forever to load, I'm just embedding a few of my very favorites. The rest I've sorted and posted to my gallery at deviantART, and I recommend you check them out there. You can download the full resolution images to use as desktop backgrounds or whatever. I'm thinking of ordering one or two as prints, and if I'm satisfied with the quality for the price charged by dA, I'll make them available there as prints, too.
Any of you who know me or read my previous air show post know that the best plane ever is the P-51 Mustang. Also, this is my favorite plane. (That it's the best is a fact; that it's my favorite is just my opinion.) A particularly cool thing at this airshow was a flyby of a Mustang with the more modern F-16 Fighting Falcon, which served a similar role to the Mustang:
There wasn't as much emphasis on the Mustang at this show as there is in Rexburg, but at least it was there, and had its chance to show off. Greg Poe was there to do his aerobatic routine, which is always fun to watch:
A popular act at the air show each year is an aerobatic routine in a Beechcraft Model 18, popularly known as the "Twin Beech". The reason this routine is so unique is that it is a plane not at all suited to aerobatics (it was designed for such uses as cargo carrying and aerial firefighting). Flying this plane like they do at the show is like drift racing an eighteen-wheeler.
Kyle Franklin was there to fly his Twin Beech, and did not disappoint:
And, with a hint of what's to come in this post:
Are you getting excited? No? Look at that picture again. How about now? Good!
Kyle Franklin wasn't done, though. He followed this up with another routine, in which his wife Amanda stands on the wing of his "Mystery Ship", and performs a "pirate" show. This was tons of fun:
I have a new goal in life: Stand on top of an airplane while the pilot performs an aerobatic routine.
There was more, too, but those were the best highlights except for the final, main act: The Blue Angels. Ooooooh, yes. I have wanted to see these guys for forever. You'd think that having expectations set so high for so long can only lead to disappointment, but you'd be thinking of things not as cool as the Blue Angels, 'cause they lived up to the hype and then some. My brother and I managed to get pretty much as close as was possible to the show without being in the special VIP area for friends and family of the performers. We were just a couple hundred feet, if that, from "center point" of all the maneuvers.
These guys are amazing. Angels 1 through 4 perform fly-bys in formation, and while they circle around 5 and 6 play chicken, performing "knife-edge" passes. Except for a couple slow "dirty" passes, all the maneuvers are at 400 to 600 mph, and at that speed they fly at a "minimum separation" of 18 inches apart. That's close enough that if they could open their canopies, they could reach out and grab their wingman's wingtip. And when they fly by a mere couple hundred feet away at 600 mph, the thunder makes every bone in your body shake. It is a truly awesome experience, and if you ever have the opportunity to see them perform, take it.
In fact, I predict that a man can find himself at the final Judgment after he dies and hear these words: "Well, you've lived a perfect life, except for one thing: You had the chance to see the Blue Angels, and you decided to feed homeless people and take a stray sick puppy to the vet instead, and also you ended war forever. What are you, stupid? We can't let you in to Heaven, sorry."
That last picture reminds me about how I forgot to take sunscreen, and I got super, super sunburned, and didn't even care because it was totally worth it.
I took quite a few photos, and these are the best of the best, but the rest of the best are here in my Airplanes folder at my deviantART gallery. Please take a look!
Guess what? I have fun stuff to blog; but while I get the photos ready, lets' get the first of two major "See, I told you so"s out of the way first.
Last month, in a post about the BP-Obama Oil Spill, I shared the following important quote by Rahm Emanuel, mastermind behind the deceptive but brilliant tactics that put Nancy Pelosi in place as Speaker of the House in 2006, and current Chief of Staff to President Barack Hussein Obama (the first racist president in my lifetime, and the first I know of to have declared open war on the United States):
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel
This quote came before the BP-Obama Oil Spill, but was validated as the central tenet of liberal political tactics as Obama's response to the spill consisted of refusing cleanup help offered graciously by foreign countries, forbidding Bobby Jindal from building sand berms, refusing to utilize cleanup boats from other parts of the country because "they might be needed where they are", and delaying BP from testing and using the cap that finally stopped the leak as long as possible. Meanwhile reporters were denied access to "oil-soaked" beaches, while Obama made an appearance between golf trips to a Gulf Coast beach to pick up tar balls (there are always tar balls on those beaches; they are a natural occurrence, due to natural seepage of oil that has nothing to do with drilling, and the recent oil spill consisted of light crude unlikely to form these balls!).
This "crisis", however, shows that the liberal philosophy goes far beyond simply capitalizing on a crisis. Rahm may as well have said "If there's not a crisis, but an opportunity to manufacture a fake one, don't let the opportunity to fool those stupid plebes that voted for us go to waste!" This was the perfect opportunity to use a net of lies to continue Barack Hussein Obama's war against America's private sector, and fire a volley of unconstitutional decrees aimed at destroying the economy of the Gulf Coast.
The BP-Obama Oil Spill was universally throughout the mainstream media and Big Government billed as the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the United States. The Obama Regime felt secure in making such outrageous claims because Big Media is always on the side of Big Government. In fact, Rush Limbaugh has coined a term far more descriptive of Big Media: Partisan Political Operatives.
There were several voices, either completely ignored by Partisan Political Operatives or dismissed as "anti-environment" or "crazy" or "invested in Big Oil", etc., who insisted that this "environmental crises" was anything but. I summarized it last month, a couple weeks before the leak was stopped:
"The Ixtoc I oil spill, about the same size as the BP-Obama spill and also in the Gulf of Mexico, occurred in 1979, and almost no-one remembers it today. This spill is bad, but it will be little more than a sentence or two in our children's history books. Even with the higher estimates of about 130 million gallons of leaked oil, the Mississippi River pours that much new water into the Gulf every 38 seconds. The Gulf is huge. Even without drilling, millions of gallons of oil naturally seep into the ocean daily, and the seawater destroys it. This is far more concentrated, but even with no action whatsoever on our part, in a couple decades it would be cleaned up naturally. The surface of the Gulf is 615,000 square miles, and the volume is 660,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. That's 660 quadrillion gallons, more than any mind can conceive. This spill is tiny, and the Earth isn't even noticing it."
The current evidence from the Gulf of Mexico seems to show that even that was an understatement! Just days after the leak was finally stopped (by BP, not the government!), there are already very few signs that anything ever happened out there. It's such a drastic contrast that even the Partisan Political Operatives who pretend to report news can't ignore it. All over Big Media, they're all scratching their heads, saying "Where is the oil?", and are desperate to find any evidence they can of environmental harm, but it's just not there! The current media template is that "the oil seems to have rapidly evaporated and been broken down by bacteria, but there has to be some sort of long-term damage, and we need to wait to resume drilling until we figure out what it is." If the media had been doing the job they claim to do, reporting news rather than pushing the political agenda of the Obama Regime, they would have been saying all along that "once this is capped, nature will take care of it far better than we can, and in a few months all will be back to normal". Instead, it's a shock and a surprise!
"The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster."
"The dissolution of the slick should reduce the risk of oil killing more animals or hitting shorelines. But it does not end the many problems and scientific uncertainties associated with the spill, and federal leaders emphasized this week that they had no intention of walking away from those problems any time soon. The effect on sea life of the large amounts of oil that dissolved below the surface is still a mystery."
"[...] understanding the effects of the spill on the shorelines that were hit, including Louisiana’s coastal marshes, is expected to occupy scientists for years."
"The gulf has an immense natural capacity to break down oil, which leaks into it at a steady rate from thousands of natural seeps. Though none of the seeps is anywhere near the size of the Deepwater Horizon leak, they do mean that the gulf is swarming with bacteria that can eat oil."
You get the idea. This was known before the BP-Obama Oil Spill, so why were those voicing these opinions treated as fringe kooks? Because that opinion wouldn't hurt Big Oil the way the Obama Regime and his Partisan Political Operatives wanted. Now, the truth is inescapable, so suddenly these people have a voice, but "don't be too hasty saying this is done, 'cause there has to be a problem and we're going to investigate until we find one or make one up!"
That would leave slightly less than 4 million barrels missing.
The best-case scenario is that much of this amount has been eaten by the gulf's natural stock of oil-munching microbes. Several scientists have said they are concerned that these microbes could cause their own problems, depleting the oxygen that gulf creatures need in the water.
But Wednesday, NOAA's Lubchenco said oxygen-free dead zones have not been detected so far. And Ed Overton, a professor at LSU, said he believed the microbial process, supercharged by summer heat, was helping. "We have made a gigantic biological treatment pond in the gulf," Overton said. Because of its work, he said, "we're well, well over the hump. I would say that the acute damage -- we've seen it, it's [already] been done. And that the environment is in the recovery stage."
Notice how they set the tone right from the beginning, suggesting that this is a mystery, and not obvious. The oil is "missing", "unaccounted for", not broken down by bacteria and taken care of by nature, even though the quotes shared say that's what happened. Don't let facts and evidence get in the way of the message!
"The light crude oil is biodegrading quickly," NOAA director Jane Lubchenco said during the response team daily briefing. "We know that a significant amount of the oil has dispersed and been biodegraded by naturally occurring bacteria."
Lubchenco said, however, that both the near- and long-term environmental effects of the release of several million barrels of oil remain serious and to some extent unpredictable.
"The sheer volume of oil that's out there has to mean there are some pretty significant impacts," she said. "What we have yet to determine is the full impact the oil will have not just on the shoreline, not just on wildlife, but beneath the surface."
But much of the oil appears to have been broken down into tiny, microscopic particles that are being consumed by bacteria. Little or none of the oil is on seafloor, she said, but is instead floating in the gulf waters.
The head of the NOAA is herself a Partisan Political Operative (that's how you get that job), and so of course is a good source for Big Media, saying here "yeah, looks like the seawater is taking care of it, but... there has to be significant impact, and we're going to look 'till we find it!"
It's not a surprise. Those of us with perspective of history and previous similar events and a dose of common sense knew this was a tiny blip in the big picture, and nothing remotely resembling an environmental crisis. The real crisis is the war being waged on American prosperity by the very man whose responsibility it is to represent the country he despises. Barack Hussein Obama, you and your big ears may have won this battle, but the war will be decided November 2010, and the Last Battle for America will be fought November 2012 (I'm starting to think the Mayans were right, and the world will end in 2012, but it won't be with tidal waves and solar flares, but with the last free country conquered by socialist dictators!).
Meanwhile, here's something ironic: It seems ethanol production isn't so good for the environment, but since ethanol is supported by the Regime and the Partisan Political Operatives, stories like this are rare: From the San Francisco Chronicle, "Dead zone in gulf linked to ethanol production".
(I thought of a clever t-shirt/bumper sticker: "Ethanol: Goes in your mouth, not in your car!")
Before I begin, thank you for the feedback on my recent Twilight post, both here and on Facebook. I haven't responded yet, but there are some interesting comments that might warrant a (hopefully brief) follow-up. I don't want to post about the same thing so soon, though, and there's so much I want to say about politics but am too frustrated to write about, so it's time for an intermission. Also, I have some crazy insomnia going on , so I'd like to share with you some awesome things I have found on the internets. Let's go!
Let's kick things off with a trailer for probably the best movie ever that I haven't seen yet but really want to because it looks like it is full of all things that are awesome except bears and flame-throwers and laser beams. You are not prepared for Sharktopus! It's part shark, part octopus, and it apparently feeds exclusively on girls at the beach, and I want one for a pet.
What a catchy tune! "Sharktopus won't be kept at bay, and you can never never never get away!" Did I mention this is a documentary? Yes, better even than Planet Earth. "Greatness comes at a price, it always has." So true. My birthday is soon; please get me a sharktopus. Also, please get me one of these chainsaw rocket launchers:
Thank you in advance.
Shifting gears, Firefly gets a retro facelift!
It seems that someone got overlooked... but that's because Dr. Simon Tam is starring in his own new spin-off!
I would watch it. I would even buy it on the VHS.
And now some puppets that would make the coolest Halloween costumes ever:
And I thought they smelled bad... on the outside! (I'm tired, give me a break.)
One more. Abbott and Costello, probably the greatest comic duo of all time, debate math:
"Did you ever go to school, stupid?" "Yeah, and I come out the same way!"
...I would not use it for the good of mankind. That's for losers.
First, I'd use it to get lots of money. That's pretty much a given. There's no point going back in time if you don't have any money, so get that thought out of your head right now.
By the way, my time machine would of course be made from a DeLorean (duh):
So, now I have a (hypothetical) time machine and unlimited wealth. Next I conquer the world, right? Wrong! Really, I'm disappointed in you. You should know me better than that; I don't want that headache! I'll stick to complaining about the people who do run it, thank you very much.
No, once I've used my time machine to obtain untold riches, I'd leak the text of the first several chapters of Twilight onto the internet while Stephenie Meyer was still trying to sell the manuscript. Apparently that's enough to stop her from publishing a book. (I guess I lied, I would use my time machine for the good of mankind, but only for selfish reasons.)
That's not what I'd need the money for, though. The money is so I can go back to really good concerts that I wish I'd had the time/money for. Like Metallica's concert with the San Fransisco Symphony in 1999 (before I was even a fan of this amazing band):
If you skipped those videos because you're not interested in metal music, you might give them a try anyway as they could serve to broaden your horizons. These recordings helped open my mind to the idea that metal really is music and not just noise. In particular, this next song is a good door to ease your way into appreciation of metal, and was my first favorite Metallica song:
After enjoying that concert several dozen times (and saying hello to the other dozen me's there, and saying "man, this concert was awesome, you're really going to enjoy it!" and "I've seen this concert three times already, is it still as good the tenth time?" (the answer is yes)), I'd go back two more years, to the east coast this time, and see this one a few times:
Beth Gibbons' voice gives me the shivers, it's so perfect... I've tried to see if I'm in the audience several times while watching these, but I'm not sure. If you see me in the audience, let me know! That would mean that someday I will have a time machine.
There are many concert's I'd selfishly go to (I'd follow an entire tour of Pink Floyd, for examle), too many to post here; but I can't leave this out:
There, did you see me? Right there around 5:04, I'm totally waving at the camera! Go back, see? Right.... there! I knew I'd get a time machine some day!
In between concerts, I'd go back to pivotal points in history to watch how they really unfolded. Also, I'd go way, way back and watch as the Earth formed. I don't have footage or photos to post yet, but I'll blog it when I do, I promise! I also might get cameos in classic films as an extra, and play pranks on famous scientists (go back and read or re-read Darwin's Origin of Species and watch for mentions of pizza). I'd also stop Fox from canceling Firefly and Dollhouse, using Marty's strategy for getting his dad to ask out his mom in the first Back to the Future movie.
Meanwhile, I'll have to make do with YouTube and my DVD of that Portishead concert. That's the closest I have to a time machine at the moment.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
If there is a single sentence that embodies the essence of the United States of America, it is this one, near the beginning of the Declaration of Independence more than 200 years ago. It is the statement on which our nation was founded. The Declaration goes on to say that the sole purpose of government is to protect these rights. These rights are given to us not by any man or group of man, not by any government or institution; it is made quite clear in our founding document that these unalienable rights are given to us by God. It is made clearer in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution that the government's role is not to grant rights, but to protect them; and that the purpose of our founding documents were to protect the people against abuses of power by government:
The Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
It cannot be made clearer that government is to be limited. A bloody war was fought to throw off the chains of an oppressive government, and it would all be a waste if we were to become as oppressive ourselves as that government so many sacrificed their lives to free ourselves from.
Sadly, we are doing just that. As we prepare to celebrate our independence from the British Empire, our Congress is preparing to confirm to the Supreme Court Barack Hussein Obama's nominee, Elena Kagan. When asked her opinion of "natural rights" not specifically stated in the Constitution, Elena Kagan responded, "To be honest with you, I don't have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution." In other words, if it's not stated in the Constitution, it's not a right of the people.
But this is the opposite of what the Constitution actually says! Many states refused to ratify the Constitution without the inclusion of a Bill of Rights to specifically limit the government from taking powers, concerned that if the Constitution didn't say the people had a certain right, the government may someday assume it wasn't a right at all. Others countered that if the Constitution did contain mentions of specific rights, that the government might someday assume that those not specifically mentioned were up for grabs. We'll never know what course our history would have taken without the Bill of Rights, but it is clear now that those who argued against the inclusion of a Bill of Rights were justified in their fears.
The one and only purpose of the Supreme Court is to be sure that the Constitution is upheld. Yet we have a Supreme Court who recently only upheld the Second Amendment (right to bear arms) by a margin of a single vote when called on to judge the Constitutionality of an illegal ban on guns in Chicago; and now we are about to confirm a Justice who refuses to acknowledge the specific wording of the Declaration of Independence and the Ninth and Tenth amendments.
This Independence Day, it is time to look back not just to the Constitution, but to the Declaration of Independence. I'd like to quote Abraham Lincoln in a speech given in Peoria, Illinois on October 16, 1854:
"Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a "sacred right of self-government." [...] Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. [...] Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. [...] If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union: but we shall have saved it, as to make, and keep it, forever worthy of the saving."
Read it again. Lincoln's thoughts at the time were in regards to abolishing slavery, but it is every bit as relevant today. In exchange for government benefits we have bit by bit surrendered freedoms to those whose purpose is to protect those freedoms, and have come to a tipping point at which we may soon lose them all or fight to save them. To quote Tom Waits, "There's always free cheddar in a mousetrap; it's a deal, it's a deal!"
Read Lincoln's words again:
"Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. [...] If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union: but we shall have saved it, as to make, and keep it, forever worthy of the saving."
In short, my point is this: Nathan's makes delicious hot dogs, but I don't like sauerkraut.
Yeah, more Twilight. If I despise Twilight so much, why do I spend so much time on it? A couple of reasons. First of all, you can't avoid it! Eclipse came out a couple days ago. Everyone is talking about it. It's all over Facebook. I hear about it several times a day. Multiple theaters in Boise have huge signs advertising a Twilight/New Moon double feature preceding the midnight showing of the new movie. Speaking of Boise theaters...
Wow! I can't remember the last time I've been to a real movie theater. There's probably a good one in Denver, but back then there was no way my family could afford that; and most movies aren't worth a first-run showing anyway, especially with passable "cheap" theaters and, even better, waiting for the DVD for a dollar at RedBox to watch in the comfort of your own home with your own snacks and good friends. Sometimes it's good to get out, though, mostly just so you got out. I know this makes me sound like a small-town hick, but Boise has a theater as big as some of the "malls" I've been to!
Back to my point about the futility of avoiding Twilight, I went on a date to see Prince of Persia at a first-run theater last Wednesday. The movie was excellent, but I'll talk about that another time. What I'm trying to say is, the theater was packed with Twilight fans waiting all day for the midnight showing. Long story short, it was 100% worth the elbow to the ribs I received from Cassie to, as we walked past a pack of girls wearing Team Edward shirts, manage to be overheard saying "Man, who knew Edward would actually come out of the closet in the third movie?" Hehehe, I'm evil...
But there's another reason. Had Twilight fandom quickly evaporated as it should have, it would have escaped my attention; but it escalates and escalates, demanding investigation. I read the first book, have seen the first two movies, and am well versed in the details of all but the last book. I have done my research, and if I am to be as objective and intellectually honest as I can be, Twilight fandom is not healthy. It is so unhealthy, in fact, that I genuinely believe it is a favor to society to speak against it. Not with "Oh, it's so dumb, if you like Twilight you're stupid!" but with reasoned, thought-out arguments against the elements of the story.
What are those elements? Twilight revolves around the most bland, empty-headed, your-face-here central character I have ever encountered. I'll get back to this soon. This main character falls in lust (Meyer calls it "love") with a vampire who is over 100 years old and has accomplished nothing in his life, has no personality, likes her for no compelling reason, and is emotionally abusive and controlling (not to mention a creepy stalker). He's a boyfriend who likes her because she smells like steak cooked just how he likes it. But she also likes a warm, fun-loving, easy-going, potentially healthy relationship but also has a dangerous side werewolf. The characters don't learn. They don't develop. The books are 90% fluff (not an exaggeration).
The poor lessons girls (I wish I could say teenage girls, but it spans all ages) learn from these books could be the subject of volumes, and maybe I'll go more into that another time. So many people have already done so.
But this post is about feeling pity for Stephenie Meyer. So back to my point about Bella's lack of personality. It is painfully obvious that Stephenie Meyer is Bella. Meyer looks like her description of Bella. The books were "inspired" by a dream of Meyer's. Meyer spends so much time on Edward's and Jacob's physical descriptions, that the books read as a play-by-play daydream of Meyer's (which they are).
This is my point: Meyer is not well. Stephenie Meyer needs serious help. Before you get all offended, I am not disparaging Mrs. Meyer. We all have our problems. I am saying this out of genuine concern. The abusive relationship between Edward and Bella is Meyer's actual ideal of "true love". This is her fantasy relationship. If she views all the things Edward does to control Bella as okay "because he loves her" and because Bella understands that he loves her, I wonder how healthy Stephenie Meyer's real-life relationships are. Especially her marriage. It's not my business to pry into her marriage; but having been in and seen many unhealthy relationships, I can't help but wonder and have genuine concern.
That's the more serious reason I feel sorry for Stephenie Meyer, but there's also a second reason:
Twilight fandom has stunted Stephenie Meyer's growth as a writer. Twilight was the first thing Meyer ever wrote. Considering this (Twilight fans who think I am closed-minded, listen closely!), Twilight is amazing. Yes, I said it. Twilight is very good. For a rough draft of a first attempt at any form of creative writing, it is excellent. (Keep track: I used "amazing", "very good", and "excellent" in conjunction with Twilight.)
Here's what should have happened: Twilight gets picked up by someone at a publishing agency, who reads it and thinks "This has potential. The Harry Potter phenomenon will soon come to a close, leaving a vacuum for young adult literature, and this could fill it; but it needs work." The publishing agent should have written back to Meyer and said "You have the workings of a really good book, but it needs more character development, better internal logic, a more present and driving conflict, and more believable motivations for the characters. Also, you need an editor." Meyer and an editor should have gone back and forth through several drafts, finally resulting in a very good teen romance novel with a fantasy twist. The end product would be a well-written book worth reading that I am simply not in the target audience for.
Instead, crap is rewarded with high praise and rabid fanaticism. Yes, I just went from calling it "excellent" to calling it "crap". What changed? The context. Twilight is a horrible final product. I hear Host is much better, and will someday read it out of curiosity; but my expectations are very low. Stephenie Meyer could have been, not the next J.K. Rowling, but the next best thing; but because of the high reward for minimal effort, she has been elevated to a status she has not earned. I consider this to be a genuine tragedy. All you Twilight fans, and especially Little, Brown and Company, are responsible for destroying (or at the very least delaying) the potential of what could be a talented writer. I hold you all responsible for depriving the literary world of what could have been good, and seriously annoying those of us who respect art.
Stephen King has famously said that Stephenie Meyer "can't write worth a darn". I disagree. Meyer probably can write, but she has been encouraged not to.
Twilight fanatics, you should be ashamed of yourselves. To those of you who simply enjoy the books (do you really? Do you own a Team Insert-Flat-Character-Here shirt? Be honest with yourself!): you're not really the problem. But there are millions of you who are. I don't mean to offend. I only hope to inspire critical thinking. Let me have it in the comments if you'd like.
It's time to name this disaster for what it is. Calling it the BP Oil Spill is not entirely accurate. From now on I am calling it the BP-Obama Oil Spill; BP because that's whose rig it was, and Obama because that's who has assumed responsibility for control of the aftermath and is profiting most from this crisis. Wait, profiting? How dare I make such a claim! Oh, but it's not just me; listen to the man who is the brains behind the Obama Regime in his own words (the relevant quote is in the first twelve seconds of video, but the whole clip is interesting):
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel
These words were spoken long before the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico, but they are revealing of the mindset of not just the Obama regime, but of liberals in general. Crisis = Opportunity. To Barack Hussein Obama, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is not a crisis, but an opportunity to do something he was not able to do before, which is to cut "Big Oil" down to size, and grab power far ahead of schedule. This follows a pattern with this regime: Housing Crisis = opportunity to seize and control banks and loan agencies; GM Bankruptcy = opportunity to gain control over a major car company; Health Care Crisis = opportunity to seize massive, near complete control over private sector insurance, hospitals, and many aspects of the way we live our personal lives right down to what we eat and whether our children are breast-fed, as well as an opportunity for massive tax increases.
The pattern boils down to this: Any crisis is an opportunity to increase the dependence of the people on the government. It is a self-sustaining pattern, as well. The more people depend on their government for help, the more often they will look to their government to bail them out. This is what I meant a year and a half ago when I wrote, as it was announced that Barack Hussein Obama had won the election, that we had officially voted ourselves a totalitarian socialist government. What frightens me is how quickly Obama is dismantling our economy and subverting the rule of law. In fact, it is amazing that I am frightened at all! I have never before had to say that I am afraid of my government, but now I am.
Back to the BP-Obama Oil Spill. How do I justify my statement that Obama is profiting from this? Just look at his (in)action. It was more than a month before he actually began to do anything. Meanwhile, though the CEO of BP gets raked over the coals for daring to participate in a yacht race during this crisis, Obama gets a pass for spending so much of his time golfing or bowling. He was already working on pushing through cap and trade legislation aimed at seizing control of the energy sector when this oil spill gave him the golden opportunity to paint Big Oil as a very visible villain and put this power grab on the fast track. Ever tar ball, every picture of an oil-soaked pelican, every minute of live coverage of oil gushing from the sea floor is another victory for Obama at the expense of the American people.
But it hasn't been complete inaction. To his credit, Obama has acted on this spill. What has he done? First off, he refused aid from other countries, offered as pure good will, to clean up the spill. It is estimated that cleanup using US ships alone will take nine months, as opposed to four months if aid from thirteen countries that offered it had been accepted. Why did he do this? Because the paperwork from the countries offering aid wasn't in compliance with the Jones Act, which was passed in 1920 to protect union jobs from being outsourced to other countries. If Obama cared about the solution, rather than the bad PR for Big Oil the longer this thing lasts, the Jones Act would never have come up.
The rest of Obama's time has been largely spent propping up BP as a villain. Yes, rather than solve the problem, the Obama regime prefers to point fingers. It's bad enough when the president of our country can fire a CEO of an American company, but now Obama has brought his Chicago mobster political tactics against a foreign company. Joe Barton was absolutely right to call Obama's treatment of BP as a "shakedown". Let's hear more of Rahm Emanuel's words:
"BP originally was going to do one relief well. We forced them to do a second relief well. They weren't going to do that. BP originally had a plan on -- on capturing, uh, a certain amount of oil. We forced that, as you know, today's reports they're up to 25,000. They originally weren't thinking about $20 billion and they originally weren't thinking about an escrow account and forcing them to do that. There are certain things that they had to be pushed -- not certain things, a lot of things that they had to be pushed -- to do."
That's right, our government "forced" BP to do what they have done. BP is an oil company. They know about oil. Rahm Emanuel and Barack Hussein Obama are politicians. They know nothing about oil. It's hard to understand, but some people actually believe that Big Oil is evil, that they care for nothing but profits. Even if that were true, it is in the best interest of BP's financial bottom line to have this crisis over and done with as soon as possible. They were already above the obligatory amount paid to victims of the disaster, with more money to come, and were already working to drill the single necessary relief well. No one knows exactly what words were said in their meeting with Mobster Obama, but it was enough to extort an unprecedented $20 billion. Make no mistake, this money was not needed for any relief effort; this money was needed to punish BP. This was not due process of law, this was extortion. Meanwhile, I don't see any fuel tax money going to pay for this, and I don't see Obama offering the one million in campaign donations from BP to clean this up. Thank goodness for "obscene" oil profits, or there would be no money to clean up the spill!
More recently Obama's regime has taken action to stop Louisiana from building berms to protect their coasts from oil, because of a dispute over where they were dredging for sand! So, you can't clean up the environment, because that's... bad for the environment.
Obama's Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, has pulled a page from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's playbook, by requesting a comprehensive report from scientists, and adding at the last minute a recommendation that drilling be halted for six months in the Gulf. This is after the scientists had signed the report! Naturally, these scientists are quite upset, and have spoken out against the moratorium on drilling as short-sighted, and a bad idea.
But if drilling caused this disaster in the first place, how can a moratorium be bad? First, it will completely destroy the Gulf Coast economy, which is dependent on petroleum. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. Second, the equipment will go somewhere else to drill. It won't just sit there or in a dock, wasted! These rigs will go to South America or elsewhere, and drill wells for Hugo Chavez. Meanwhile, Americans will still need oil, so we'll have to import it! Remember Exxon-Valdez? Tankers are a spill threat, too, and we'll see more of them if we don't drill our own oil. In six months, the moratorium would be lifted, but the equipment would already be engaged elsewhere. Fortunately, we have a hero, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, who is willing to declare the moratorium beyond the scope of the executive branch, and a bad idea. Thank you, Judge Feldman! Don't back down!
There is so much more to say, but this post is already running long, so one more thing to close. We need to put this spill in perspective. Yes, it is bad. It is a disaster. There is nothing good about millions of gallons of crude oil spewing into the gulf, and causing damage to the environment, not to mention the economic loss even before Obama capitalizes on this crisis. But we need the proper perspective so we don't panic and handle this poorly. As bad as this spill is, it isn't that bad. It's easy to show pictures of oil-soaked birds and real-time feed of the spill at its source, but it isn't that bad. Here's what I mean:
The Ixtoc I oil spill, about the same size as the BP-Obama spill and also in the Gulf of Mexico, occurred in 1979, and almost no-one remembers it today. This spill is bad, but it will be little more than a sentence or two in our children's history books. Even with the higher estimates of about 130 million gallons of leaked oil, the Mississippi River pours that much new water into the Gulf every 38 seconds. The Gulf is huge. Even without drilling, millions of gallons of oil naturally seep into the ocean daily, and the seawater destroys it. This is far more concentrated, but even with no action whatsoever on our part, in a couple decades it would be cleaned up naturally. The surface of the Gulf is 615,000 square miles, and the volume is 660,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. That's 660 quadrillion gallons, more than any mind can conceive. This spill is tiny, and the Earth isn't even noticing it.
Bottom line, this is nothing to panic over. It is bad, but it's not that bad. Not worth hasty actions that will have a lasting impact on the U.S. economy without any measurable environmental benefit. Many people are calling Obama incompetent. I wish that were the case. Obama is successfully carrying out his real agenda, the strategic dismantling of the United States so it can be rebuilt in His Image. Obama's actions (and inactions) are purely evil. BP is not the villain. Our own government is.
Meanwhile, this man's idea to stop the leak by meditating the well closed is a far more realistic and effective idea than any action taken by our government.
Remember the Obama Regime's philosophy: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
