Dead Boy Detectives

 

Just finished watching the first episode of Dead Boy Detectives (Available on Netflix). Good stuff! Of course, I read the source material, so I'm familiar with the characters and their back stories. Pictured are the two dead boys. They're ghosts and the living young woman with them has psychic powers, so she can see them and talk with them. I like the philosophy/theology that forms the backdrop of their tales. 

Death, seen here with her brother Dream and someone who has just now died, acts kind of like the Viking Valkyries, she physically transports your soul to the afterlife. You get to chat with her for a minute or so and then she'll take you there. The whole point is, at least at the very end of your life, no matter how miserable or tragic your life was, you get to speak with someone who cares. 

In the comic book, there's a whole story about why Death has not taken the two dead boys off to the afterlife, but the first episode doesn't go into that. 

Exodus

Pretty good! Exodus reminds me of Noah, earlier this year. Generally, both movies stick close to their source, diverging now and then to have the story make more sense. Naturally, the Ten Commandments by Cecil B.DeMille, starring Charlton Heston (1956), didn't have Moses engaging in any sort of romantic subplots, so I thought the part of Exodus where Moses marries a woman from Midian (Zipporah was played by Maria Valverde) was an attempt to jazz up the movie for today's audiences. Nope, I went to one of my bookshelves after getting back from the movie, checked my Revised Standard version of the Bible (1952) and, sure enough, Moses escaped Egypt, went to Midian, got married and they had a son. Then he returned to Egypt and started pressuring the Pharaoh to release his Hebrew brothers and sisters. I liked that the movie made Moses the adopted brother of the Pharaoh and an honored aristocrat in the beginning of the movie before he ran off to Midian. Makes sense and makes the whole conflict between hm and the Pharaoh more direct and personal.

And no, it's true that Moses was not historically a white person but he's played here by a white actor (Christian Bale). The director says he needed investment money to start with and needed viewers later, so he needed a “bankable” star. I decided to take the ethnicity of Moses as one of those ”suspension of disbelief” things, y'know, where Superman chats with Green Lantern on the surface of Mars, and where you accept the premise so that you can then concentrate on the human drama, the relationships between the characters, the cool special effects, etc. And I agree that any time is a good time, any time is a bad time, to start introducing diversity into movie casting. There's no reason why 2014 is any better than 2024 or any worse that 2004 or vice-versa.

Saw The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 last week. Recommend seeing parts 1 and 2 in a reasonably close-together fashion. Mockngjay part 1 will probably come out on DVD or on one of the cable channels when Part 2 is about to show, so it shouldn't be difficult to do that. .

Two reactions to a Kathleen Parker piece

Kathleen Parker has a piece up about abortion fights taking place. In the first, she claims that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity has the right to stop giving Planned Parenthood $680,000 a year. That's absolutely correct. Komen is a private organization and does indeed have that right. Yes, "given the rabid response from abortion-rights supporters, you’d think that Brinker and her organization were running puppy mills for soup vendors." That's true, because Komen executive made their decision for blatantly political reasons and then tried lying and dissembling and fudging about it. Komen decided to dive into the pool of a heated and divisive political issue and then acted surprised when the people on the other side of that issue started yelling about it.

Parker suggests: "Don’t like it? Don’t run in Komen’s fundraising races. Don’t buy a pink blender. Give directly to Planned Parenthood." What's Parkers' problem? That's precisely what lefty critics have done. No one has threatened to launch any sort of legal action, no one has threatened to burn down their buildings and no one has been beating up or assassinating Komen personnel. Critics have indeed loudly protested Komen's decision, but that's just as much our right as it is Komens' right to decide how to allocate their cash. Parker's complaints about "Coercion and intimidation" are just so much hyperbole. I'm not at all clear on where critics have gone overboard in their reaction to Komen's very bad decision and what Parker thinks the correct response should have been.

BTW, I think it's absolutely hilarious that the Bush Administration spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, is connected to the Komen story. "Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the position of 'Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations' at Komen last December." Very tellingly, "Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood," meaning that, no, the decision to cut off Planned Parenthood was made several months ago and they thought up the whole BS "if you're involved in an investigation" story as a very deliberate way to single out PP for getting cut off. The hilarious part is that "Whu-u-uh?!?! A former Bush Administration official made a clumsy and stupid PR move?!?! Na-a-a-ahh!"I mean, gee, those guys were so nimble and light on their feet when it came to PR [/snark].

The second part is that Parker is upset that Roman Catholic hospitals are being told to "provide health insurance that covers contraception, including in some cases abortifacient drugs." She and the Roman Catholic hierarchy feel that this constitutes an infringement on Catholic religious liberty and she and they also fear that "these requirements are the edge of the wedge." Sorry, I have absolutely zero sympathy for her arguments.

Back when I was in the Navy, Muslims who wanted to get military ID cards for their wives wanted to get them with their wives' faces veiled. We said no. We were willing to have the ID photo taken by a female, with no males nearby to see the wifes' unveiled face, but we were not willing to take a photo of a veiled face for an ID card. The military needed to be absolutely certain that the person holding an ID card was indeed the person they said they were. The religious desires of devout Muslims were incompatible with our military needs, so their religous desires took second place. Some devout Native Americans want to smoke peyote as part of their religious rites. As they were doing so long before white, Anglo-Saxon settlers occupied their land, the usual classification of peyote as a "controlled substance in Schedule I" is lifted, but it's lifted specifically for Native Americans so that they can continue their religious practices uninterrupted.

In both cases, the law and what the Federal Government needs, trumps the law of religious freedom and liberty. If Catholics don't like providing women with the means to control their wombs, then they can sell off their hospitals to private entrepreneurs who are willing to abide by the national law. If Catholics who practice medicine within those hospitals don't like it, they can go to another country or they can find another occupation. Under no circumstances does religious liberty take precedence over a woman's Constitutional rights.

Update: What Digby said.

The frustrations of figuring out the traditional media

The New York Times does a front-page, somewhat lengthy (16 kilobytes) story on Cindy McCain that's all about her as a person. The reporters go to rather absurd lengths, one of them "...trolled Facebook and found adolescent classmates of Bridget McCain's and -- at least in one case -- sent an email..." that asked some rather rude and invasive questions along with dredging up 15-year old matters and wondering whether the McCains' marriage was one of true love or was instead a convenient business-sort of alliance. This wasn't attractive when the NY Times did it to the Clintons (David Broder defended a 2006 article of theirs and was called, quite justifiably, a "panty-sniffer") and it's no more attractive when they do it to a political conservative.

There simply don't appear to be any standards left. It seems that every aspect of a politicians life is now fair game and it's not at all clear that the public has gained anything useful from all this.

Ah, but wait! Are there any subjects that are off-limits? Any questions that the traditional media will not ask? Strangely enough, yes. In late August, the Religion Blog in the Dallas Morning News noted that "The presidential candidates have answered more religious questions than a seminary student," but although Governor Sarah Palin was clearly a Christian, it wasn't at all clear what "flavor" of Christianity she subscribed to. The blog finally concluded she might be a "Charismatic" Christian. One thing that's clear, religion is a subject near and dear to her heart:

Palin, her husband Todd, and their growing family attended Wasilla Assembly of God until 2002, when they moved to Wasilla Bible Church. Palin also has worshipped at other churches, including the Church on the Rock in Wasilla. In Juneau, the state capital, she has gone to Juneau Christian Center.

Of these four churches, two--Wasilla Assembly of God and Juneau Christian Center--are members of the Assemblies of God. Founded in 1914, the Assemblies of God is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the country. Pentecostalism--which takes its name from the day of Pentecost when, according to the Book of Acts, the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles--is a movement that began in 1901 and is best known for its emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit, including speaking in tongues. The other two churches are freestanding congregations. The Church on the Rock is "charismatic," a term usually applied to more recent forms of Pentecostalism, while Wasilla Bible, the Palins' present church, is neither Pentecostal nor charismatic.

These branches of Christianity are quite clearly not meant to be ones that their adherents take casually or that they attend on an on-and-off basis. The Catholic Knight defends Palin's religion as a perfectly ordinary one:

What we have here is very typical of mainstream Evangelical doctrine. It is very Protestant. There is nothing on the fringe or radical about it. This is what most Evangelicals believe. The same goes for most Pentecostals. The difference between them is mainly in detail and practice.

There was apparently a backlash around the beginning of September:

Time’s Mark Halperin went so far as to publish a graphic suggesting that “Anti-Republican, liberal media bias” contributed to a “feeding frenzy” in which the press becomes a shark pursuing a saintly Sarah Palin.

It was noted at the beginning of October that:

We've noted before how the campaign press seems reluctant to ask pointed questions about Palin's religious beliefs. Specifically, if she believes that Christ will come again in her lifetime as part of the End Times theology her former church preached, and how that End Times belief might guide her decision-making as vice president.

The Real News Network just posted an informative video about Palin's fundamentalist faith and asks why the press isn't posing direct questions about it. 

So Palin's religion appears to be one matter that the media considers more-or-less off-limits, though of course the other three candidates remain completely fair game for that subject.

Another subject appears to be the whopping double standard of the Barack Obama-William Ayers relationship and the far deeper, far closer relationship of John McCain with G. Gordon Liddy. Liberal blogs were talking about that relationship as far back as May of this year. It took a late-night comedian, David Letterman, to finally ask McCain about what was clearly a blatantly obvious double standard. Funny thing, no one appears to have taken Letterman's questioning as permission to start questioning that relationship themselves.

Unfortunately, after Letterman broke the media's embargo on questioning McCain's relationship with Liddy, reporters quickly pretended it never happened -- or, if they did mention it, downplayed the significance of the relationship.

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But the worst was MSNBC. This morning, the cable channel played a clip of McCain on Letterman -- but not the Liddy exchange. Then, immediately after the clip, MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall referenced the McCain attacks on Ayers. At no point did Hall mention Liddy.

So is the media taking a "no holds barred," "scorched earth" policy and asking all sorts of rude and inconvenient questions? Well, yes and no. There are quite a few areas where they step very gingerly and other areas where they've disgraced themselves with their boldness.

Number of Sarah Palin items

"...a local Wasilla woman's view of Palin the politician"

•"Hockey mom": true for a few years
•"PTA mom": true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since
•"NRA supporter": absolutely true
•social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, BUT vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconsitutional).
•pro-creationism: mixed. Supports it, BUT did nothing as Governor to promote it.
•"Pro-life": mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby BUT declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation
•"Experienced": Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.
•political maverick: not at all
•gutsy: absolutely!
•open & transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.
•has a developed philosophy of public policy: no
•"a Greenie": no. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
•fiscal conservative: not by my definition!
•pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.
•pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents
•pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla's history.
•pro-labor/pro-union. No. Just because her husband works union doesn't make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.

Membership in an heretical church.

Palin's dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use of state travel funds by Palin for a trip she made to Wasilla, Alaska to attend, on June 8, 2008, both a Wasilla Assembly of God "Masters Commission" graduation ceremony and also a multi-church Wasilla area event known as "One Lord Sunday."
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The Wasilla Assembly of God church is deeply involved with both Third Wave activities and theology.
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The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form "Joel's Army" to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God. While segments of this belief system have been a part of Pentecostalism and charismatic beliefs for decades, the excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000.

A close look at Palin's pregnant daughter Bristol and what exactly the liberal objections to her pregnancy are.

Of course, there is no shame attached to choosing to have a baby when you're young. Nor is there any shame for choosing not to.

McCain, like Bush, wants to eliminate our opportunity to have that choice. But that's not all. Despite all evidence that it doesn't work, McCain, in lockstep with Bush and Palin, wants to continue the ludicrous notion of funding sex education that doesn't educate, but only preaches [i.e., "abstinence only"]. [emphasis in original]

Obama gets in a good one:

Keith Olbermann: “He fights pork barrel spending,” said this new McCain/Palin ad, “she stopped the ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’” ...

Barack Obama: They’re not telling the truth. You know, I mean, it’s — I think we’ve all gotten accustomed to being able to spin things in politics. But when you’ve got somebody who was for a project being presented as being against it, then that, you know, stretches the bounds of spin into new areas.

And do we REALLY want someone of McCain's temperament to be our Commander-in-Chief, with his finger next to "The Red Button"? Sounds like an awfully dangerous proposition! But even given McCain's explosive personality, do we REALLY want the 2008 presidential election to be about personalities? Does that truly serve the interests of the American people?