I just got done watching the movie Thirteen and it was pretty much one of the most intense movies I have ever seen. I don't want to do a review right now because I think I need some time to mull this one over but, as the end credits roll, I found myself thinking that I knew the perfect song that should be playing over them: "Breath Me" by Sia. It's a dark, intense, and profoundly beautiful song, but it is cathartic at the same time.

I don't know what it is about Sia Furler that always gets me. She has a kind of breathy voice and she doesn't enunciate well; two qualities that don't usually do it for me. But everything I've ever heard from her (she often sings for my favorite band Zero 7) is goddamn beautiful and sexy. Do yourself a favor and listen to this:

Fucking FOX Network

So I just found out a couple minutes ago that a second season of "The Loop" ran on FOX this summer. Even if it's not the greatest sitcom ever, it's still probably the best thing on TV in the summer. The first season that ran last summer was most definitely entertaining. Plus, it's one of the few shows out there that isn't set in L.A. or New York, the two most fucking self-absorbed cities in the world, or about cops or doctors. SO pissed I missed that, I'll have to wait for the DVD.

Speaking of kickass shows not set in L.A or NYC or about cops or docs, I just got the DVD of the first two seasons of "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia," and so far, it definitely is as funny the second time through as it was the first. I even watched some scenes from the original pilot (original title:"It's Always Sunny on Television," set in LA, ironically, and about actors rather than pub owners) on the DVD and I am glad they changed the setting and tweaked the names a bit. I think the bar location has been a lot more interesting than the whole struggling-actors-in-LA angle would have been. Third season starts on Sept 13th on FX. Everyone should be watching this show.

Progressive Draft?

There has been increased chatter lately about reinstating the draft. The posts last week in Slate offered up some interesting ideas about the draft that I thought were worth considering as well as some obviously tongue -in-cheek options. I liked the Foreign Legion type idea where we use mercenaries and offer them citizenship in return for service. One idea that I thought was missing, however was the idea of a progressive draft, like a progressive tax, that would even the playing field between the rich and poor. How would that work? Instead of the bullshit draft by birthday system of the Vietnam War, we would use weighted random selection from the draft registry database. Men on the registry would be given weights or probabilities based on the economic status of their parents. I believe in this solution for the same reason that I believe in a progressive tax: the wealthy owe more to the state because the state establishes and maintains the system in which they acquire their wealth. The upper class in this country receives all kinds of advantages that they all seem to forget about when tax season rolls around and they get to whining.

First of all, the government maintains only the most lax controls over corporate behavior. This ensures that the wealthy can use free market arguments to build profits at the cost of their employees. Business like WalMart get away with paying their employees a minimum wage that keeps them below the poverty line. The corporate world also uses labor in undeveloped nations to keep costs down while charging a premium for their products ie: $100 pairs of sneakers from Nike made by children for a pittance in southeast Asia.

Second, the progressive tax helps to redistribute wealth to help bridge the gap in advantage established by the aforementioned practices. It is admittedly mildly socialistic to demand that the government supply some social services to the poor by taxing the rich, but it is a fact that most have come to accept in this country: pure Capitalism is essentially heartless, while pure Socialism is essentially brainless. So we've learned to live with a little compromise between the two here in the good old US of A.

If that makes any sense at all when asking people to give up their money, I don't see why it is any different when asking people to give up their lives. Does a kid from South-Central LA owe more to his country than a Seneator's son? I don't fucking think so. The wealthy kid has lived his entire life benefitting from the socio-economic system maintaind by the state and its laws. The poor kid has not. For me, I land somewhere in between, and, despite my hatred for the Shrub administration and its catastrophic war in the mideast, I would stand behind a progressive draft. As it stands now, with five years of draft ability (I think) under the current rulse, I hereby pledge to fight the draft with all my strength if it is ever reinstated under any other conditions.

I haven't posted in a while. I guess I've been mired in the lazy doldrums of summer for the past couple weeks. Things have been going slowly all around. I spend most evenings watching tv, movies from Netflix, or reading, none of which makes for a particularly interesting post. I've also used up most of the random other thoughts that had been rolling around my head. I've been considering posting the mini-thesis I wrote up for my Poli-sci class last winter but then I figured that nobody wants to read a ten-page paper on power and resistance written by a physics major with only one poli-sci course under his belt. Plus it would be a bit of a hassle to bring the file into word to make a PDF of it in order to post it, if nobody is gonna read it anyway. I was pretty proud of that paper though, I worked pretty damn hard on it and it got me an A in the class that was seriously kicking my ass up to that point.

My office mate, today, was correcting an exam for one of the classes he is TAing this summer and some of this girl's answers were so fucking dumb, no scratch that, medieval, that we just spent twenty minutes laughing at her. This was a multiple choice test, mind you, and one of the questions was, "Why do the stars appear to rise and set in the night sky?" and she actually chose the answer "Because the stars rotate about the Earth." Apparently this girl time-traveled here from some long-past pre-Copernican era. Yay for college!

Rise and fall of the American Empire

I had a teacher my Freshman year of high school who was by most accounts a pompous ass. Most of what he taught us was far to simplified or taken out of context or just plain wrong, but he taught it like it was goddamn scripture and his tests were basically a complete mind dump of all the buzzwords and strange stories he told us. Some of the shit he told us has really stuck with me over the last half-decade and especially in the past several months I have been thinking about one of his lessons in particular. The man loved to talk about what he called the Greek cycle of government and the lesson went a little something like this. Governments cycle through good and bad turns helmed by different numbers of people: Tyranny was good government by one man (I shit you not, this was one of the more counter-common-sensical things he told us), the tyrant was a "Poor boy made good" but after a few generations of power, tyranny would descend into Monarchy, bad government by one. This would be followed by oligarchy or good government by the few who were the "best and the brightest" but, of course this would inevitably be followed by aristocracy - bad government by the few, for those of you following along at home - and then there would be another regime change to Democracy: good government by the many! And this, of course, lapses into Anarchy, bad government by the many, from which there must arise another poor boy made good, a Tyrant, to begin the cycle all over again. If that all sound like nonsense to you, try to think about it without attributing any prejudice to the nomenclature that he used and it may sound more reasonable.

In any case, in light of recent events, political goings on, etc. It occurs to me that the American Democracy has long since collapsed into anarchy (again please read the word by his definition and not the common meaning). I could give so many examples of bad government in the past several decades but really, we've pretty much heard them all if you ever listen to any dissenting voices (Stewart, Colbert, Olbermann, etc.) in the media. And if you haven't then you probably don't care. The one example I will give, however, comes from a documentary I saw recently called "Maxed Out!" about the credit industry in the US. It outlines how the credit industry preys on the weak and feeble minded, uses intimidation and unfair business practices to collect debt, and manages to thwart any legal regulation by weaseling it's way, like so many other industries, into the very legal system that is the only thing that has the strength to oppose it. The movie specifically talks about how the President appointed a former high-level executive of one of the worst offenders among this industry to be the "Credit Czar" to investigate his own business practices. Furthermore, the film discusses how the credit industry lobbyists wrote the bulk of the recent bankruptcy reform bill that made it harder for individuals to shake off their harassing creditors in order to start fresh.

What I mean to illustrate by this example is that corruption has become the norm in our government. Politicians are so deeply in bed with different businesses and special interest groups that they have completely lost sight of what they were elected to do. They are supposed to defend the people of the United States of America from other institutions, both foreign and domestic, that try to take advantage of us. Instead they spend their time accepting yachts and free meals from lobbyists and investigating steroid use in professional baseball. Real fucking great use of the taxpayers' time and money. Meanwhile we are mired in two different wars against some bat-shit crazies in the middle east, one of which we were deceived into believing was worthwhile, the cover-up for which leads to ever greater depths of post-modern surreality as the Shrub administration lies, denies things it has said in public and on camera, uses the co-opted and complacent Fourth Estate to spew fear-mongering bullshit into American homes, and, the Coup-de-grace, commuting the sentence of the one administration official who was held accountable for his actions by the branch of government that is supposed to help keep the executive in check.

In my mind, it is undeniable that we have bad government by the many: congress, the executive, and industry in bed together with the bat-shit crazies of our own country (Don't believe me? Watch the republican debates from a month ago, the one where they are asked whether they believe the earth was created in six days 6000 years ago and all the assholes raise their hands.).

(DISCLAIMER: From here on out, the following is mere conjecture and prediction by the author, based on an admittedly amateur understanding of history and political "science." It should in no way be construed as advocating sedition or violence.)


This brings to mind another one of my dear teacher's lessons from freshman year of high school. The man gave us his theory of revolution. He said that a true revolution is a complete overhaul of the institutions that compose society. Furthermore there were three steps in the process of revolution. The first was Middle Class Alienation, the middle class gets pissed off with the ruling group because, dammit, things should be better than they are. Second comes Radical Seizure in which the middle class stirs the working class into overthrowing the old regime. Finally there is the Thermidorian reaction which as Lenin (I think) said "the revolution devours its children. The middle class bump off the lower class and keep the power for themselves.

What I see today is a branching of two opposing possibilities for the future. Either the American public will continue to accept the corruption, the vile and hateful lies of it's government, and the continued collapse of justice and common decency and sense among the ruling elite or it will finally snap back to it's senses and unburden itself from the bad government under which it finds it self. By all means the middle class ought to be fucking alienated by now. The wealth gap continues to grow as the last American industrial jobs are sent overseas, middle-class tech jobs are outsourced to India, and the average American male of 30 today makes less, when adjusted for inflation than his father did decades ago. The economy continues to be desolate for the vast majority of Americans despite how the government would like to suggest that since the Stock Market is thriving, the economy must be good.

So what is it going to be? Complacency or revolution? I guess only time will tell.