CAFTA passes House 217-215

If I were to post the things the darker half of my nature is tempting me to say right now, Blogger.com would not only suspend this blog indefinitely, they would track me down, drag me out and have me shot, burn down my apartment, and sow the ground with salt.

This is a dark night for America. It was horrible over ten years ago when NAFTA passed, and it just got a lot worse.

The 217 that voted for this are traitors. The President of the United States is a traitor. To their country, the Constitution they swore to uphold and their fellow men.

Remember what I said last night about the border situation? Between that and this, that John Titor guy's talk about a civil war this year is starting to look a lot more viable.

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Her love is real... but she is not

If there's ever a major jump in artificial intelligence, we are in serious bat guano if it gets coupled to this new technology. From the BBC:

Japanese develop 'female' android
By David Whitehouse
Science editor, BBC News website

Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a "female" android called Repliee Q1.

She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner.

She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe.

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguru of Osaka University says one day robots could fool us into believing they are human.

Repliee Q1 is not like any robot you will have seen before, at least outside of science-fiction movies.

She is designed to look human and although she can only sit at present, she has 31 actuators in her upper body, powered by a nearby air compressor, programmed to allow her to move like a human.

"I have developed many robots before," Repliee Q1's designer, Professor Ishiguru, told the BBC News website, "but I soon realised the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence..."

Looks like the Cylons have already beaten Adama's rag-tag fugitive fleet to Earth:On the brighter side of things, this is going to make for some wonderful employment opportunities in our future...

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CAFTA vote in House coming today?

Am hearing that the vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement in the House of Representatives might be coming as soon as today.

Any member of the House who signs onto this is a traitor worthy of putting against the wall. Ditto for everyone in the Senate who did (guess who that was from North Carolina) and anyone else for that matter.

Our "representatives" no longer represent their constituents. They only screw them. For however much money they can get out of us.

On top of the previously-mentioned illegal immigration, this is what is destroying our country... and hardly anyone is giving a damn about it.

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This is where and how America's next civil war begins

From the Associated Press via the Monterey Herald:

Tensions rise along San Diego Border between Minutemen, protesters

SAN DIEGO - Clashes between California Minutemen and protesters are heating up along the Mexican border with reports of shots fired and an alleged scuffle between a state senator's aide and a university professor.

The confrontation between University of California, Riverside, ethnic studies professor Armando Navarro and Mark Belgen, an aide to Sen. Bill Morrow, R-Carlsbad, allegedly occurred July 16 in the border town of Campo. The area, about 40 miles southeast of San Diego, is where several dozen anti-illegal immigrant activists have set up watch for migrants crossing the border. They are expected to continue patrols through Aug. 7.

Belgen was accompanying Morrow to Campo to support the California Minuteman Project's anti-illegal immigrant border patrol group, modeled after the group that monitored Arizona's border earlier this year. He alleges that Navarro kicked him.

Belgen was unhurt and told the North County Times he waited to report the incident until late last week because initially he did not know kicking was considered an assault.

Navarro, who heads the immigrants rights group National Alliance for Human Rights and was protesting the Minutemen, declined to comment to the newspaper, citing the seriousness of the allegations.

A message left for Navarro on Tuesday was not immediately returned. Morrow's office declined to comment, citing a pending investigation.

Minuteman volunteers and protesters have traded accusations in recent weeks...

I'm amazed that this hasn't registered on the national radar screen that much. Well, yet anyway.

The past few weeks and months have seen a lot of trouble brewing on the border with Mexico. And it's our own government's fault. President Bush outright refuses to do anything about the illegal immigration problem... hell he's practically inviting them to keep coming in! Congress is unwilling to tackle the crisis because with the exception of very few in the House or Senate, they're all afraid of losing Hispanic votes. Fercryingoutloud, conservative "hero" Grover Norquist just said that "It’s not clear to me that opposition to immigration is a vote-moving issue."

What the #$@% is going on here?!?

Lately I've been wondering a lot about the infamous John Titor, and whether he was really a time-traveler from the year 2036. Ya know why? 'Cuz he said a civil war in the U.S. is in its seventh year by 2012: a civil war between the United States government and rural American citizens. That would put it starting either this year or next. And there's nothing closer to pushing us over that brink as is the border situation. Regular American people have already begun doing the job that their own government refuses to do, illegals and criminals are shooting at American citizens from across the border and sometimes even well beyond it, and the Mexican military has even given escorts to "immigrants" streaming over the line. I'm all for legal immigration... but what's happening illegally is stretching our resources and infrastructure to the breaking point. Sooner or later - and more likely than not it'll be sooner - it's got to snape. And it ain't gonna be pretty.

Keep an eye on the U.S.-Mexican border over the next few months. It might be, in the words of a Chinese curse, in for some interesting times.

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We are so DOOMed

The first time I heard about this it was 1994 and Ivan Reitman was supposed to direct it. Eleven years later and the movie version of Doom is finally coming out. Over at IGN.com they have an exclusive trailer for Doom. Wonder if the movie includes that legendary wonderful "Barney the Dinosaur" WAD that we all enjoyed back in the day...

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Enough time has passed that I can comment on this

Do not do not DO NOT click on this link if you haven't read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yet. My wife is reading it now and I've had to be VERY careful not to let any spoiler-ish material slip my lips. Suffice it to say: I just wanted to make note that in regards to a certain "something" regarding this book, that I made a perfect call on it well before it had been released.

I'm pretty good at that. Sometimes. :-)

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Oops, guess we can't say "Roll out!" just yet :-(

In light of that last post about the live-action Transformers movie in '07, Ain't It Cool News is now reporting that the project is getting torn apart by its producers. At issue is whether or not to use the original cartoon's cast of voice actors.

My take on that is this: get an entirely new crew of voices. The cartoon was good for its day but it's now time to re-introduce the Transformers for a new generation... and redefine it for another that should now be expecting more. Think of the talent that's available today to do this: I can't help but think of Liam Neeson for the voice of Optimus Prime, or Sean Astin as Bumblebee. Besides, many of the original actors have sadly passed on, including Chris Latta (as the irreplacable voice of Starscream) and Scatman Crothers, who I never knew until now that he did the voice of Jazz, but thinking back on the cartoon I guess he did! Anyhoo, there's been so many iterations of the Transformers (my favorite was the Marvel comic, BTW) that it'd be wrong to limit the vision for the movie to just one: let the big-screen live-action feature stand on its own, with its own unique cast of actors.

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July 4th of 2007 will never get here fast enough...

Ooh-boy, just got back into town after a coupl'a days and found a real treat over at Ain't It Cool News.

In the name of all that's good and holy... was that Devastator?!??

Click here to see what I'm talking about. When you go to the video, the good stuff starts about 2:00 into it.

Spielberg. Bay. The Transformers. As of this moment my future offspring now has a legend for their own generation. And sonuvagun, it's one of mine's too :-)

(P.S.: there's even more stuff over at TransformersLive.com, including a video presentation by Steven Spielberg.)

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Another deep essay by Kyle Williams

If you want to wrap your brain around something really meaty read the newest piece by Kyle Williams over at WorldNetDaily.

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V for Vendetta trailer hits the net

No, this ain't a big-screen movie about the man-eating alien lizards that NBC shocked us with back in the mid-80s...

I will be there opening day to see this, even if I can barely explain it to anyone else I know. I borrowed this graphic novel from a friend in college about ten years ago. It's... interesting, to put it mildly. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore is something like "George Orwell's 1984 meets Batman meets Moore's Watchmen meets Guy Fawkes meets Terry Gilliam's Brazil", if any of that makes sense at all...
In brief: the graphic novel was set in an alternate-history Great Britain where a Nazi-ish regime came to power. Mysterious and masked V runs around doing neat things like killing those in power and sabotaging government-run broadcasting, all in a bid to sow chaos and let anarchy reign supreme. Being an Alan Moore work, it naturally became a comic book classic... in addition to being a thought-provoking commentary on totalitarianism and creeping fascism.

And, it looks like in the hands of the Wachowski Brothers, this movie is going to nail the comic pretty darned close (which doesn't happen much with an Alan Moore adaptation). I don't really know too much about this to be honest but just going by the trailer it looks like they're edging away from the "almost-happened" reality and putting this into the realm of our possible future. This might be a perfect movie for our times, as evidenced by this quote from the trailer...

"People should not be afraid of their government. Government should be afraid of their people."

Well worth checking out the trailer and not just because of Natalie Portman's dead-on impersonation of Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3 either. There's also this curious lil' visual...
That's John Hurt looking EXACTLY like that tele-screened image of Big Brother from that movie version of 1984 (the one with the songs by Annie Lennox and Eurythmics) that Hurt was in over twenty years ago! I saw this and laughed so hard I almost spewed Coke all over the monitor. That's just gotta be intentional humor on the part of the Wachowskis. Anyhoo, mash down here for the V for Vendetta trailer and watch shaven-head Natalie Portman and the guy who played Agent Smith lead a violent upheaval against tyranny and oppression.

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Open the Windoze and look at the Vista

It's been almost four years already, and Bill Gates thinks that's long enough to go without a new operating system: Windows Vista will be arriving late in 2006. 'Course they announced Windows 95 a few times and it kept getting pushed back more and more, so it may yet be '07-'08 before this sees shrink-wrapping.

Sobering thought that until very recently there were only three things that people would line up for at midnight to pay money for: a new Star Wars movie, a new Harry Potter book, and a new Windows OS. Soon it'll only be Windows on that list. That's a pretty sad statement about us when you think about it...

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Scotty has read his last technical journal...

James Doohan - better known as that most lovable of Starfleet engineers Montgomery Scott or just simply "Scotty" - has died at the age of 85.

I met him once, very briefly. Super nice guy, Doohan was. I just read that he was a veteran of D-Day, even lost part of a finger on one hand during the fighting.

He beams up to the good company of fellow Enterprise crewmember DeForrest Kelly (Dr. "Bones" McCoy). I don't know what else to say but: Warp speed, and God bless Scotty.

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My thoughts on John G. Roberts as Supreme Court nominee

I don't know much about this guy, but from what little I've read so far he sounds like a pretty strong practitioner of judicial restraint. Eager to see what his views are on the Second Amendment and the recent Kelo decision (the one that allows cities to steal private land and give it to rich developers) but I found this quote by Roberts to be quite interesting indeed...

"We continue to believe that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overruled."

Roe v. Wade is the classic example of bad litigation coming from the bench. If Roberts feels that way too about it, I'll be rooting for him to clinch the job.

You see, I can praise Bush for something if he ever gets it right!! :-)

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About "that thing" in Half-Blood Prince...

Someone read my review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and shot me an e-mail saying "whatever happened isn't that big a deal is it?"

Oh yes it is.

The more I think about it, what happens at the end of chapter 27 (that's as far as I want to go in pinpointing what exactly it is) may well go down as one of the top ten all-time greatest moments in English literature: right up there with Sherlock Holmes's apparent death at the hands of Moriarty, Sidney Carton at the guillotine and the final showdown with Moby Dick. This might be the first real classic moment of literary drama in the twenty-first century.

This is like the 1980 "Who shot J.R.?" thing all over again: that kind of gripping. 'Course the big question after that episode of Dallas was "Who shot J.R.?" In this case it's not so much a matter of who but WHY did this happen? Theories abound. I don't know which one to believe but if anyone's wondering, you're going to have to highlight this next part to see it 'cuz it's "inviso-texted": SPOILER - highlight to read Dumbledore wasn't pleading for Snape to spare his life... he was pleading with Snape to end it! Keep in mind that Dumbledore is NOT someone who's afraid of death: as far back as Sorceror's Stone he was telling Harry that "for the well-prepared mind death is but the next great adventure" or something. In Order of the Phoenix he tells Voldemort that there are things worse than death and not understanding that has always been Voldemort's greatest weakness. It's like Dumbledore knew that death was finally here and he wasn't going to contest it. But there was something going on there that we don't know yet. I think Dumbledore is definitely dead i.e. he ain't coming back, but I've got a gut feeling that even his own death was part of some larger plan that will fully unfold in Book 7. Hey I called it last week that Dumbledore would die and was right about that, maybe I'm right about this one too :-) END SPOILER. So there it is, set down for the record for later consumption.

So with Half-Blood Prince done, I'm finally going to read Eragon by Christopher Paolini, which several friends have told me is an excellent book. I might file a report on that one later too :-)

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That's a darned tempting target for any snipers...

I don't have the heart to post this picture here: AfterShock found it so you're going to have to visit his blog instead.

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William Westmoreland is dead

Just coming off the wires that retired U.S. Army General William Westmoreland has died at the age of 91.

Westmoreland was the commander of the American forces during the Vietnam conflict. I've never thought that was a war worth our fighting in, but Westmoreland did the duties given him to the best of his ability, as honorably as anyone could hope for in that kind of situation. I think his was the classic example of a general whose hands were tied by the bureacrats back home... the ones that nowadays would never see a real battlefield even once in their lives. It was a mistake made then and it's a mistake being made now and there's a lot of good soldiers that are going to take flak for it for years to come, just as Westmoreland did and wrongfully so.

But, that is an argument for another time. Right now, time to remember a great American, a loyal servant to his countrymen, and for me personally a fellow Eagle Scout.

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Two great articles by Vox Day and Kyle Williams

These are two of the best writers working today, I honestly believe. They're definitely the two best regulars that WorldNetDaily has writing for itself. First up is Kyle Williams's piece from this past Saturday on "evangelical Republicanism":

...I still consider myself very much conservative in the way I view government, morality and even theology. Yet, I firmly believe the way the American evangelical leadership has responded to the power struggle of politics is reprehensible. When I really began to believe – not just intellectually, but with my life – the message of Solomon's Ecclesiastes, I began to think critically about the way Christians relate to the world and specifically culture and politics, and it seems as if the message of evangelical Republicanism is teetering on the edge of idolatry when it comes to whom or what we give our allegiance...

And then today Vox Day files this piece about Christians "saving" society:

The liberal theologians are correct in one regard: Jesus Christ was a revolutionary. He overthrew a tyrant worse than Nero, King George and Stalin combined when he defeated the prince of this world by means of his death on the cross.

And yet, in America, Christians have somehow become the de facto guardians of the middle-class taxpayer's dream. Cleanliness, an adjustable-rate mortgage and a three-car garage are not next to godliness, they are considered to be rather more important. There is, I submit, more faith in George W. Bush than Jesus Christ in the evangelical wing of the Republican party; one imagines that Karl Rove will soon prophesy of the Third Coming of The Bush, a King of the South of pure blue blood who will save America from the Scarlet Woman of Arkansas...

Both are well worth checking out. So go do it. Now!!

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