So i'm going to start blogging again. Haha don't believe me huh. Well tomorrow is my birthday and I'm going to drink this wine. Which is supposed t0 be pretty good

And its 2002 which will mean that the tannins will be nice and mellow.

Bitches love Sanskrit

Thanks Penny Arcade...we all worship at your altar

Hulu.com

Here is an exciting developement from the very studios that are trying to make you pay $40+ on a season of their subpar shows. Hulu.com is a website in beta that is trying to be the answer to network tv on the internet. At this point however, most illegal downloaders are not going to delete their torrent software or stop paying for their rapidshare account. But this is a move forward for the industry and hopefully they will open up Hulu.com to all consumers in the near future. For those who can't wait there is a site call Openhulu.com which puts up these videos that are luckily embedable. I hope you enjoy the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I have embedded here.

I know that I haven't blogged lately but that's just life, isn't it? Here is most recent desktop...all themes and backgrounds are from customize.org..Enjoy!

Your brain on video games

I thought this was interesting...and scary. Psychologists knocking video games especially halo 3 because there is more activity in your brain and that means that you are going to kill people. I especially liked one of the user comments which i will include. I am still looking for my plasma rifle.




TheBird Says: October 16th, 2007 at 7:25 am
ah, yes, i remember that “brain difference”.
the same EXACT change in activity occurs when playing a nonviolent game
seriously, when the original HALO came out like five years ago, then shouldn’t all those kids that grew up with it be out and about killing people?
maybe they’re just having trouble finding a plasma rifle


HEHE

Premiere Week

Last week was premiere week on many networks and there were a lot of quality shows that premiered last week. Here are links to download high quality files that are rips from hd broadcasts. Each of these files is around 350 mb and megashares only gives you 250 mb at a time so you will have to use a download manager. Enjoy!


Kid Nation

Heroes

Chuck

Journeyman

Stargate Atlantis

The Office

My Name is Earl

Ugly Betty

ER

Bionic Woman

The Unit

House

Bones

Chuck


I will be posting my review of Halo 3 in the near future. Not owning a 360 it has been difficult to finish the game so i haven't posted until i finished it. Not that i am finished i will review all parts of the game. I am also going to start posting reviews of movies and television shows that i have been watching. Many tv shows i will review after i have watched the second episode of the season, especially new shows. I like to give them a chance to show themselves off. Thanks and may the force be with you.

Ode to a Conservative

There you go Kurticus Maximus, I still got the magic!!!

Here is the longer version of the Believe ad...much better than the short version...my girlfriend Charlotte said that she saw it on television today while baking cookies (entirely serious) so enjoy...more is to come on halo 3 and other topics. May the force be with you.

Halo 3, Star Wars, and my generation

I am beginning to think that the imminent release of the greatest FPS of all time is a good reason why i should restart this blog. If anyone reads this thank you for actually caring. The news flooding from Bungie Studios has lately flown so thick and fast that hardly a day has gone by without some goodies coming from Bungie. Halo has, in the minds of many including myself, become the Star Wars of this generation. I know this phrase has been thrown around a lot lately, but I would like to quantify this statement. The original Star Wars Trilogy was a fanciful story of a small group of freedom loving rebels taking down a large evil empire. Much ink has been spilled on these movies' relation to real life, but even I, untrained as I am in the matters of film, can draw out the basic correlations. The time when the Star Wars movies came out was a time of great uncertainty in America. People wondered whether the US's supremacy in the world was at an end. It seemed that our struggle against the Soviet Union was going badly. Star Wars does not translate perfectly into the events of that time, but the struggle of the Rebels (America and the West) against the evil Galactic Empire (Soviet Union) was very indicative of the losing attitude many Americans had, especially after the loss in Vietnam.

Now is a different time with different problems. WE are unpopular in a world that seems to continually use "America" and what she is seen to stand for as a scapegoat. Terrorism has affected America in a very strong way and we are in a war at the heart of the beast that is growing more unpopular daily. The simple desperation of earth's plight is a welcomed tale in the complicated and morally muddled world in which we live. Our country was attacked without provocation in both Halo (while it is instead our entire world instead of just America) and on September 11th and in both tales we face an enemy that will stop only with our total destruction. There are heroes in both battles and while we honor our valiant woman and med at arms, especially those fallen in the field of battle, the United Nations Space Command has in Halo a man who embodies all this courage, honor and inhuman resolve and adds a liberal amount of kickass--Master Chief--Spartan-117--John. A recently released commercial for Halo 3 has an old man telling his story of being a marine during the Human-Covenant War and almost losing faith until the appearance of Master Chief. His myth is almost that of a god giving hope to those who have none. He is an icon of an age that needs hope and will gain it from one of the most unlikely places--a video game. I don't think that it is a coincidence that the Star Wars extended universe has added a similar story to the universe with the invasion by the Yuuzhan Vong in the New Jedi Order Series. Here, however, one finds what I would consider a much more complicated storyline with much greater moral ambiguities.

So when you are playing Halo 3 don't see it only as a game, but a deep allegory of the days in which we live--great days for courage and honor but also dangerous in their moral ambiguities.

May the force be with you as you finish the Fight.

Iraq

Haven't been writing at all, but i think that this letter pretty much sums up the War in Iraq. It is written by a soldier serving there.

Senator Reid,

I am a US Army Reservist. I was activated in March 2005 and served on
FOB Abu Ghraib, Iraq from June 2005 until May 2006. I was First Sergeant
for a Medical Task Force responsible for all detainee health care in
Iraq. My unit was awarded the Meritorious Unit Commendation for our
accomplishments and I received the Bronze Star for my achievements. I
certainly hope you can sense the pride I have in my unit and my service.
That pride will soon be stripped from me in defeat.

My father is a Vietnam veteran; a Captain in Saigon. Like me, he was a
volunteer and was awarded the Bronze Star. He began his tour when I was
two weeks old. While I was growing up, I heard over and over again in
classes from grade school well into college how the United States lost
the war in Vietnam. I wondered how he could be so proud in defeat. I see
now that it is happening to me how his pride and accomplishments were
stripped from him on a rooftop in soon-to-be Ho Chi Minh City.

The Democrats have wanted Iraq to become a Vietnam for George Bush from
the start. You, sir, finally have your Vietnam parallel. This war has
been pure politics for you and the Democrats. You have now conceded
defeat when the Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and Airmen
have not. And my children will have their parallel as well. They will
wonder how I can be so proud in defeat. The only question that remains
is whether my defeat will be a dramatic airlift off a rooftop or whether
it will be an impotent crawl across the Kuwait border.

From the beginning you and your ilk have sat on the sidelines, our
sidelines, declaring the immorality, illegality, and the futility of
your country's efforts. In emergency medicine there is an old saying; if
your patient believes he is dying, he probably will. Your stance on Iraq
will prove to be just that sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. To my
children, I will have to explain how the war was declared "illegal" by a
bunch of politicians who readily admit they didn't read the
authorization to use force that they signed. And how Hans Blix didn't
really declare that the inspections were working, only that they would
keep Hussein from doing too much. And how Hussein violated every
resolution the UN threw at him. And how the Democrats connived the US
into thinking the war was all about Big Oil and Haliburton without
batting an eye at the corruption surrounding Total Fina Elf, Yukos, and
the Oil for Food program. And that the only shred of illegality
surrounding the war is the lack of sanction by the very institution, the
UN, that sat by idly and allowed a brutal thug to buy their morality.

This loss will be compared to Vietnam, as you wish, but the loss will
not be mine. It will be yours. It will be Speaker Pelosi's. It will be
the Democrats' loss, forever and ever. In fact, since the Democrats'
conceded defeat in both Iraq and Vietnam when we were winning
militarily, the only Vietnam parallel you will likely achieve is how the
Democrats so readily accept defeat.

We are winning this war. Just look at the signs. The enemy cannot safely
wear uniforms, they cannot confront us directly, and instead they hide
amongst and target unarmed civilians. When they succeed in blowing up an
unsuspecting marketplace, they can count on you to dutifully deliver the
big sound bite about how the civilian body count is direct evidence that
the war is lost. Then you tell the same enemy that all they need to do
is kill more civilians and wait, kill more civilians and wait, kill more
civilians and wait. They were waiting for 2009 but, fortunately for
them, "elections have consequences."

This is not the 1960's or '70's. This is the information age and, sir,
there is simply too much information about this war that contradicts
your statements and actions. History will not be kind to you.

--
1SG Steven G. Cotton

Sub production

Isn't this pathetic? Well it is.

Remeber when we followed the Russians?

Here is a story that I had glanced at this morning, but Kurticus Maximus brought to my full attention. Supposedly, last month a Chinese submarine tracked an American aircraft carrier group. The article insists that the submarine got close enough to fire its missiles before it was detected. This story hasn't been in many other newspapers, but the premise is entirely valid. The lack of funding for further research into submarine warfare is a byproduct of winning hte cold war. While China continues to upgrade, modernize, and expand their naval capabilities we mothball some of the greatest ships that have ever been made. There have been plans by the Navy to maybe cut the U.S. submarine force down by almost 1/3.

The threat to the United States that is posed by the Chinese Navy is not just the imagination of warmongering conservatives. China's incursions into international waters have taken them closer and closer to the United States and our assets around the world. In Febuary 2005, Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld commented that the size of the Chinese fleet could surpass that of the United States in as little as a decade. "It is an issue that the department thinks about and is concerned about and is attentive to." Umm...sorry Rummy old boy, but it is past the time for concern. Even Germany has been developing new subs. This video shows their new sub which they have billed as the quietest sub in the world. Actually the Gotland class sub made by the Swedish is the quitest sub in the world; and it was made ten years ago.

The German captain in the video makes cruise missiles look like something that the Germans came up with yesterday. They been used on subs for almost fourty years.

And we should make subs just because they are cool. Yeah i am a neo-con. I don't mind our military scraping the boomers. They were a necessary evil, but i find myself feeling a lot safer now that we don't have huge subs stuffed full with nuclear weapons all over the world. They were never as fast or sexy as the fast attack boats anyways. So America, we need more subs. The next goal is to engineer a nuclear sub that is almost as quiet as a diesel working on batteries. Sometimes i miss the russians. At least back then we made awesome subs. The Chinese are not as dangerous as the Soviets are, but it would be a shame to lose a war based on bad politics. Screw the hungry. Build subs.

May the force be with you.

P.S.-Here are some cool links
http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/type_212/
http://mil.jschina.com.cn/huitong/han_xia_kilo_song.htm
http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,NI_China_0303,00.html
This is a submarineers blog that is really cool. I plan to add it to my blogroll.
http://makeyourdepth.blogspot.com/


PSS-okay so we still do make attack subs. On September 9th, 2006, the USS Texas was commissioned. But we need more. Sorry if i sound greedy. Oh..and more aircraft carriers. What the hell guys?

Here is my second show

Here is the link to my second show if you live in regan dorm...otherwise i don't have enough bandwidth.

All Nighter

2:57 a.m.-Having weighed my options...the only one i find credible is that of an all nighter. I did not delay on writing my philosophy paper. O.k., that was a lie. But i did try. Philosophy papers have always hurt me in ways that not even words can express. So this three page paper packs a bit more punch than a similar length paper in a different class would. Come on! Let me write about terrorists. I could quote psychological profiles of different terrorists from memory. But I have, now at 2:55pm 2 full pages of my paper. The paper is actually 2-4 pages long, but mine will probably be a little over 3 pages. I also have a test in Chemistry for our Lives, granted an easy class but the amount of work has given me no time to study at all. So at this time i feel like i have lots of energy, i'm focused but a little lost in my paper. I will check back throughout this night so i can give a record of my activities. God grant me strength.

3:29 - Well i read all of my Chemistry stuff and there are a few things i have to look at again. Now time to get back to the paper. God help me.

4:02 - Well i wrote some profound things and i found a nice passage in C. S. Lewis to use, but the organization of the paper still is elusive to me. There is a cohesiveness to the piece but not enough. I talk more about what i can than what i need to. Started friending people and adding screennames to aim. Now reflecting and hoping that blogging will get my brain going. Oh yeah, already feeling a little more sleepy. Want to lay in bed. But i have the feeling that that could be bad. Like paper not done bad.

9:15: Well i got a lot done but not everything, and then i decided to take a short nap. Haha...goo morning children. But I am still so fucking tired. And i have work study after class.

Book Review

You know I don't have much to say (writing a philosophy paper), so on the words of one Patrick Cavanaugh i looked at a revew of a book by James Carroll called An American Requiem. This is what a book revew should be.

One of the worst qualities of the Baby-Boom generation is their propensity to view their own personal concerns and desires as if they were universal moral imperatives. The most notorious
example of this was their opposition to the Vietnam War, during which they turned a perfectly typical lack of enthusiasm for warfare on the part of those who will actually have to do the fighting, into a sweeping judgment that the war was itself immoral.

This annoying trait has never been put on more ostentatious display than here in James Carroll's memoir about his tortured relationship with his father during the war years. Joe Carroll, who had quit the seminary just before his ordination as a priest, went on to become a lawyer, an FBI agent, an Air Force General, and the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Having judged himself unworthy to be a priest, he and his devout wife Mary placed their hopes in their sons, with James, after his older brother Joe contracted polio, becoming the natural choice to become a priest. James did go through the motions of joining the priesthood, though it's never clear from his narrative that he held any genuine religious beliefs, but as he became increasingly involved in the Catholic Left anti-War movement of the 60's & 70's, he eventually quit the Church. He has since become a bestselling novelist, a Boston Globe columnist, written this prize-winning memoir and has just written Constantine's Sword, a "historical" account of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church (see Orrin's review).

These are the bare bones of the story and they suggest a young man whose opposition to the immorality of the Vietnam War causes a crisis of faith. In point of fact, the War seems to have had little to do with Carroll's personal crisis, certainly its morality had nothing to do with it, instead the story he has to tell is that age old tale of youth rebelling against authority. I'm loathe to engage in psychoanalysis, being both unqualified and not much of a believer in its efficacy, but Carroll uses the term Oedipal so often and the book is cast so clearly in the form of an Oedipal drama that it's hard to avoid doing so. Start with the fact that he outdoes his father by actually becoming a priest, where Joe fell short; continue with the way that this profession figuratively wed him to his pious mother, whose entry to Heaven would be virtually guaranteed by virtue of having borne a priest; move along to his utter rejection of his father's profession and an eventual adoption of complete pacifism; then conclude with his decision to leave the priesthood after his father had been forced out of government and crippled by disease. It's hard to see how Vietnam actually matters to any of this psychodrama : had his Dad been a butcher, Carroll would have become a vegetarian, had he been a fireman, Carroll would have been an arsonist. This is a mere story of generational tension dressed up in the ennobling guise of a great moral struggle.

The most revealing aspect of Carroll's self-portrait and the account of the moral dilemma he supposedly faced as a result of the War is his complete failure to consider the consequences of peace on the Vietnamese people. His opposition to the War, as he himself depicts it, is almost exclusively a function of the fact that he's made uncomfortable by the means that were being used to conduct it. There is not a single word of consideration here of what would, and did, happen to the people of Vietnam once America withdrew. The moral calculus at work seems to be that it is better that Vietnam be destroyed by Communism than that a single American have to commit an act which will trouble his conscience. That is a perfectly honorable argument to make, and a necessary corollary of pacifism.

Even this shortcoming would not be so bad were it not for the impact it has on the rest of the book. But one result of his failure to treat this issue is that he ignores what was certainly a central motivation of Cold Warriors like his father. They certainly prosecuted the War because they had considered the consequences of not doing so and found these consequences unacceptable. While it is possible, perhaps even accurate, to argue that they were wrong in their determination, simple fairness requires that Carroll give them their due and look at their legitimate motivations. Deprived, by the author, of the beliefs that drove them, they are presented as one-dimensional characters whose sole purpose is to stand as convenient villains in Carroll's little morality play.

At one point in the book Carroll places the "blame" for American involvement in Vietnam on the Catholic Church and the advocacy for intervention of folks like Cardinal Spellman. Though delusional, this assertion is of a piece with his blaming the Holocaust on the Catholic Church, as he does in the aforementioned Constantine's Sword. One has, first of all, to be troubled by a man who attributes such power to an institution which after all represents a minority of the citizens of Germany and the United States and which has proven incapable of influencing those nations on such issues as birth control, and the like. Secondly, one can't help noticing that there's an element here of reenacting the Oedipal drama with his biological father, his rebellion now directed towards the figurative father, the Church, perhaps even God. The cumulative effect of these two books is to suggest that the greater problem lies not in the sins, real or imagined, of Joe Carroll and the Catholic Church but in the psychological conflicts of James Carroll.

Finally, Carroll claims to have arrived at the viewpoint that war is always unjust. How then would he square his concern over the Holocaust with this position ? He makes much over his obsession with the threat of nuclear war : but if we'd had the bomb in the late 30's or early 40's, or better yet, if Churchill had it, would Carroll really oppose dropping it on Hitler and the high command of the Nazi Party, no matter how many innocent civilian lives it would have claimed ? Would he really be unwilling to sacrifice 30,000 or 40,000 or however many in order to save the tens of millions who ended up dying during the War ? For an author who writes with such smug self-certainty about the purity of his own moral vision, and who is so eager to judge the moral failings of others, he somehow manages to avoid the really hard questions that his newfound philosophy raises. For all that these books are about the author himself, they ultimately reflect fairly little deliberation over the ramifications of the moral choices that he's made.

Which brings us to the final legacy of the Baby-Boom generation. They have succeeded brilliantly in rebellion, in rejecting the institutions, the morals, and the beliefs of their parents and the other generations that came before them. The problem they have left behind is what should replace the Judeo-Christian culture which they've done their best to destroy. Perhaps in this sense James Carroll's book is a signal text for his generation : just as he speaks eloquently about rejecting the faith of his fathers but falls silent about what has replaced it, his generation stands amidst the rubble they have created and have no idea what to erect in its place.

GRADE : D-

Addendum

Addendum to last post:
Oh and i am sick of hearing about how Christians used to use religion for war. That was the past. At the time so did Muslims. Actually they used the sword to convert a lot more than the Christians. This PC bull has to stop. The only thing that matters is now. At this moment those charges don't hold. Get over the past.

The Religion of Peace

This is just rich. Pope Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor in a speech as saying, "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."' Obviously this is a reason for the Muslim's to riot. I would like to have that statement disproved. If we relied only on what happens everyday in the Muslim world, this statement would be proved. Maybe the statement was said in bad taste, but the idea of the Pope was not for the statement. I am listening to the BBC as I write this and a Muslim is saying that we should not have freedom of speech--that those who are form Nazi ideals should be silenced. That we don't understand Islam. Well teach me. Make me understand. Make me understand why the Muslim countries in the Middle East and elsewhere are so violent. Make me understand why so much is done in the name of God by Muslims that is evil and base. The argument that there are Christians who use religion for violence isn't a real argument. Have they killed thousands for the cause of God? Why can the west not even have intellectual arguments while the middle east can decend into violence and we are at fault. Riots over comments by the Pope and over cartoons show that the Middle East is heading to a fork in the road. Will they choose total destruction or will they pull from the edge. Eventually the world's patience with these "Muslims" who pervert religion in favor of violence will run out and the real action will start. Not the small attacks that the United States has made, but the fight for their own survival. This rant is from a man who is sick of having his country's hands tied while the Muslim world tears itself apart. This from a man who wonders when western moral restrain ends and the real fighting begins. May the force be with us all.

September 11th, 2006

Today we remeber all we lost.
And we will never forget.
We will finish the fight.

Weekend

Ok..so i haven't posted in a while. Memboku it isn't really that i am busy (even though i am crazy busy), it is more that I am feeling lazy. Side effect of too much Plato.

Anyways I have had a very interesting weekend. On Saturday, I went to spend time on the National Mall for one of my friend's birthday. As we were walking up to the Lincoln Memorial, we stumbled on to a taping session for a movie. We found out that the movie is called The Kingdom and that the stars are Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner. And there they were. The movie itself is about Garner and Foxx who are FBI agents trying to unravel the mystery of who bombed an American building in the Middle East. My friends and I were actually in the movie because we were asked to walk in front of the camera as if we were tourists (I go to college here...i am no tourist!). So we may be in the movie if they take that shot.


I also happened upon (thanks sean) a post on the Cornell Society for Having a Good Time about woman ordinations. It seems some German bishop has started ordaining women in the US and even has a woman bishop. They still claim to be "Roman Catholic". Here is the video.



So anyways, it has been an interesting weekend. I promise i will be more regular in posting from now on. But damn do i get lazy. May the force be with you.

?????

back at school...awesome