Month: March 2013

I’ve been distracted lately. Not least among the reasons is that the sequestration is causing odd things to happen at work. Besides that, I am feeling as inspired as an RNC Minority & Women Outreach planner. Assuming, of course, that such persons exist.

Anyway, I promise to return soon to my ones of readers with completely fabricated tales of adventures through looking glasses or other such optical surfaces.

It’s interesting to me that creepy shill for the gun manufacturers Wayne LaPierre is allowed to get away with giving a crackpot fantasy rant suggesting that people need semi-automatic weapons (read: assault weapons) Why? Well, obviously if something like Katrina happens again, decent people (if you know what I mean) must be able to defend themselves against roving bands of those people (if you know what I mean). I, for one, can’t think of anything that would have helped New Orleans more than thousands of assault weapons in the hands of clearly paranoid right wing loons.

I think a major difference between normal people and deranged right wing loons is that most people prefer their first-person shooter fantasies in the form of video game or movie zombie or alien invasions. RWLs prefer their first-person shooter fantasies in the form of absurd scenarios involving waves of brown people. More importantly, they invest thousands of dollars in weapons in preparation for exactly that. A collapse of society would show everyone.

“They said I was mad to have my 9-year-old shoot human silhouette targets, but who’s laughing now?”

Unfortunately, no decent human being can take any pleasure when such a parent is gunned down by the same child immediately prior to his murdering 20 small children and 5 other adults.

Much of the water cooler talk and email traffic of the last few days has been about the sequester. While most discussion is on the direct impact on our little corner of the world. Few of my colleagues opt to engage in debate as to the causes.

First, I should step back a bit. When I really began paying close attention to politics, around the year 2000, I began to see a bit more clearly the more I learned. On the one hand, I watched The O’Reilly Factor and Fox and Friends almost every day. Why? Well, absent any real knowledge up to that point, I accepted the conventional wisdom that all of the media but Fox News were draped in some nefarious cloak called “liberal bias.” You may not recall, but Fox and Friends wasn’t always an over-the-top propaganda mill with a target audience of cranky assholes in the early stages of dementia (I choose to believe that, rather than the alternative, that I was easily deluded). Mr. O’Reilly was a bit slicker, and I was able to stomach his show for far longer. Unfortunately, I have a rather good memory. As I have come to notice about all professional right wing bile-spewers, O’Reilly’s analyses are always wrong and he mistakes volume for veracity as the most important facet of argumentation. Once I finally accepted the implication of the pattern of intentional misdirection and creative interpretation with which he feeds his sheep, I began to strictly read the news.

…but I digress…

So I do understand how easily a person can be misled if he hasn’t done the homework required to get a full appreciation for what is going on in the world in general and the world of politics in particular. That doesn’t stop my blood pressure from approaching dangerous levels when I hear blame for the absurd “problem” lay equally at the feet of the Republican House and the Democratic Presidential Administration.

The sequester can be analogized in many ways, each focusing on a specific facet of the stupid. But I like things simple, and I would describe it simply. The sequester was put in place to force the Legislative branch to do its job. How? Obviously, the consequences should be so dire that only a malignant idiot would allow it to proceed. While I would argue that they have overstated the results, nevertheless, I will take on the other part of their premise. Rather, the so-called Tea Party did that for me. This “grass-roots” organization funded by the same handful of John Birch Society supporters that fund most right wing groups poured billions of dollars into the coffers of the most misanthropic collection of halfwit sociopaths ever assembled (that was not subsequently defeated by the Justice League, that is).

They were planted in the government with the intent to prevent sanity from ruling the day. The purchasers of democracy have gotten exactly what they paid for. And not a one of them regrets it.

—Spoilers—

This truly awful movie is a study in paranoid fantasies. It weaves an imaginary world of good and evil in the kindergarten-simple style that is rarely seen outside the wasteland of TV punditry. The movie begins with, as many comic-book movies do, an event involving an impossibly skilled person conducting some absurdly complicated scheme wherein several extremely unlikely things have to occur in concert. Actually, that’s not quite true. This movie begins with two. The 90 lb. female lead is then presented as an expert in both the thieving arts and the martial arts, yet is inexplicably impoverished while enjoying the ability to blend with high society. The ridiculous villain is propelled by some terrible (and I mean that in the “terrible movie” sense of the word) cause to destroy Bruce Wayne. Oh, and he’s going to kill millions of people as well. The genocide is a bit incidental to the Bruce-Wayne-killing part, but some IQ 64 writer thought it would make for enough drama to camouflage the idiocy of everything claiming to be plot in this flick.

Anyway, after the 90 lb. woman in high heels kicks Batman’s crippled ass to steal his fingerprints, the handoff is an attempted ripoff resulting in some of the bad guys getting killed and Commissioner Gordon getting kidnapped. A woman (who is obvious to any person capable of feeding himself with utensils as the ultimate villain) appears as the convenient non-feline Bat-crush™. A few double-crosses later, the flimsy manga cartoon playing Catwoman delivers Bruce Wayne up to the most stupidly-named villain found outside the realm of terrible 1980s cartoons: Bane. Perhaps “Enemyman” was taken. Anyway, Batman’s years of Batmanning have left him with no cartilage, rendering him physically inferior to the younger Bane. Bane breaks Batman and throws him into an inescapable prison on the other side of the world. It has only been escaped once before. Then Bane’s dozens of henchmen take over a city of many millions by ruining a football game.

Thankfully, minor injuries such as a literally protruding vertebra can apparently be successfully treated with a rope and a swift kick. During Bruce Wayne’s twine-and-punch-based treatment, Bane acquires the Bat-thermonuke™ that Bruce Wayne had built in his spare time.

Conveniently, the Bat-thermonuke™ will take several months to explode. This can be calculated to the minute, but that will probably not be important to the rest of the movie. Some old blind doctor (the one who instructed the Bat-cellmate™ in the rope-and-beating treatment of traumatic spine injuries) informs the Bat-cellmate™ about something he probably heard from The Secret: don’t use a safety rope while trying to escape. In the same way that not wearing a seatbelt makes one a better driver, not having a death-preventing rope makes Batman a better jumper. Once Batman decides he really wants to heal, he has a miraculous recovery, escapes the prison, and is somehow instantly transported to a completely sealed off Gotham City.

I assume a Rocky-style training montage took place off screen, or I was meditating to salvage brain cells while it took place on screen. Post-montage Batman kicks montageless Bane’s ass in too-quick-to-be-end-boss fashion. Then the Bat-crushT stabs him in the kidney. It turns out she was the child escapee of the inescapable prison (oops, if your IQ is less than 64, spoiler). Bane was the adult that had helped her escape. Of course, this would mean that since she is roughly the age of Batman, Bane is actually the old man in the equation. Somehow, this is lost on the writer, who probably had a lot on his mind. I suppose that mountain of cocaine wasn’t going to snort itself. Wispy manga cartoon Catwoman shows up to save the day, having instantaneously mastered the Bat-murdercycle™, but only after the Bat-crush™ ruins the the Bat-plan™ to just plug the Bat-thermonuke™ back in. Though it has been several months, this all occurs within minutes of the detonation time. If only there were some martyific means of saving the day…

So Batman saves the day by suicidally disposing of the Bat-thermonuke™ using the Bat-hoverthing™. Everyone has a sad. Then it turns out he’s alive and the Inception guy is the new Robin. Then the franchise was stabbed in the kidney and incinerated in a thermonuclear explosion. I hope.

The end.