"On Movies"

"...I'd rather read through the worst novel ever written than sit through the best movie ever made..."

The Cigarette-Smoking Man to Bill Mulder, "Musings of the Cigarette-Smoking Man'

Movies don't satisfy me for the most part. I find more release from looking at my father's golden retriever perform auto-analingus from across the room, or watching the NYM infielders drop game-ending pop ups.

A lot of people, particularly Syed Hossain, find my opinions of movies annoying. They also find my "in-movie commentary" as much a pestilence as I am forced to swallow down there unbridled silence. If you are with someone, and you are bearing witness to scenes that are absolutely ridiculous, or hysterically stupid, you have an obligation to make remarks during the film, while it is actually playing; not just retain these mental notes for use later. I find arching my head back for 3 hours to eat inflated prices of cancerous-inducent food that tastes like crap with a bunch of strangers in uncomfortable seats isn't the best usage of my time. Especially when you're with friends! Why would you go spend time with friends at a movie theater? Yes, you are physically sitting next to them, but your mind is fused into a screen. I actually think going out to the movies on legitimate "dates" is a catastrophic idea, I've never done it. Why would you want to spend the few hours you have with the woman you're trying to court, NOT paying attention to her?

Generally speaking, I find watching movies in cinemas to be unpleasurable and I'm not a big fan of doing it. Aside from trashing Keynesians and the State, my other muses in life consist of New York Yankees, jazz, family time and unprotected sex with multiple partners.

For the most part, it's my amateur opinion to say that the majority of films I've watched in my life were complete, disastrous flops and were probably produced as a result of a bunch of misallocated resources. There is a system I devised that I use to rate how much I like or dislike films. I've adopted a neoclassical approaching in translating my internal, subjective ordinal rankings of satisfaction that I receive from watching bad movies descending from 100 (highest) to 0 (least) into a numerical scale of cardinal values, using a utility function.

Only an Austrian will catch that last joke.

"Magnificent" = 99-100

"Decent" = 40-98.99999999

"Shit, terrible, fucktastic" or someother expletive in Spanish = -10,000,000 - 39.9

Here's a list of the worst of the worst that I could think of, there's so many more:

• Sicko
• The Preacher's Wife
• Titanic
• Wall-E
• Saving Private Ryan
• Deep Impact
• Bowling for Columbine
• Angels and Demons
• War of the Worlds
• Godfather, Pt. II
• Schindler's List
• Amadeus
• Iron Man
• Hitch
• Conspiracy Theory
• Borat
• The Departed
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• World Trade Center
• Transformers I & II
• Mulan
• Aladdin
• The Lion King
• Billboard Dad

I also put the following films in my bag of all-time best, in no particular order:

• Wedding Crashers
• Star Wars
• Antz
• Up
• Bobby
• American Gangster
• Charlie Wilson's War
• Gangs of New York
• The Darjeeling Limited
• Mission to Mars/Red Planet
• A Clockwork Orange
• The Lord of the Rings
• Annie Hall
• Recount
• The Matrix
• Wall Street
• Old School
• Flubber
• Thank You For Smoking
• There Will Be Blood
• Godfather, Pt. III
• The Bank Job
• The Dark Knight
• Enemy of the State/Minority Report
• X-Files: Fight the Future
• Evolution
• Glengarry Glen Ross

And if you want an example of action packed, unrealistic, science fiction movie done right, watch The Dark Knight.

"...Picking away at "In Defense of Libertarianism"..."

Sometime last year, the Columbia Daily Spectator had a blarticle titled "In Defense of Libertarianism", written to no surprise by someone who clearly does not understand libertarianism. He makes a fairly unbiased, but albeit, misinformed analysis of the pros and cons of the libertarian doctrine. I speculate that the impetus for writing it was a mixture of the CUL blog and the growing freedom movement, especially since it has been more vocal in the past couple months.

I was upset by this blog post. Not that I dislike libertarianism from appearing, in an blog post, media is always good. Despite a few flaws here and there, I can actually swallow this.However, the writer makes one comment towards the end, which showed me he had studied libertarianism more than I perceived:

"Well, not really. That's a facile, straw-man understanding. Libertarians aren't anarchists (at least, not the smart ones)-they understand that some government is necessary just to make people get along. How much government? A police force seems necessary. A defense force probably, as well. Other institutions? Perhaps. But does the government know what crops should be grown, and when and where and how much, let alone what farmers should do the growing? Libertarianism predicts what experience shows: over-regulation is a recipe for naught but pork-barrel cronyism."

It's a pretty loaded statement he makes (which I highlighted in bold) because if he's read most serious libertarian papers, he would have realized that the "smartest" libertarians are indeed anarchists. That's because most libertarians follow the non-aggression axiom, and the logical deductions that are derived from that principle is that you can't support a coercive monopoly of law and public security.

"Un-American Dissent; Where did it go?"

Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer wrote an op-ed in USA Today titled "Un-American Dissent". Here's an excerpt if you don't want to read all of it:

These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.

Since when is it an "un-American" to attack pending public policy?

The words "American" and "dissent", should be synonymous and interchangeable. To be "American" is to "dissent" from the majority. It means having a natural inclination in being a stern skeptic of every memo and report that the Federal government proposes, and of every single policy the politician claims will benefit his or her constituents; every use of judicial, legislative and executive excercise is met with It means retaining a substantial degree of individual liberty, and adhering to moral virtue of responsibility to oneself, family and community. America was conceived in liberty, in dissent to lack of political representation, endless taxation, expropriatoin of land and home. The tyrannicalisms of British Crown and the inflation of the Royal Bank of England, were all foreign mishaps on the free peoples of the thirteen colonies.

America was the first legitimate experiment because for the first time, it was founded on the crux of a new principle: liberty. Liberty is the natural state of man to be free, dissenting from toxic ideas, and moving towards healthier ones. War, inflation, slavery, taxation, business cycles and regulation, are all products of the State, not of free people, free minds and free markets. Patriotism should be defined not as heraldry to the American government, but as a perpetual opposition to any variety of Statist expansion into the lives of free peoples. Government has not changed, but the people have. Where is the anti-war movement now? Where did it go? Did it pass underneath the phalanxes of "hope" and "change"? What is change? The voices of the fallen have been drowned out by the sheepish blabber of "hope" and "change".

It was not un-American to attack the prior executive administration and Congress, and it isn't un-American to attack this one. In fact, it would be un-American to abstain from doing so. When Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer write that to dissent is "un-American", send them and the rest of the crony parasites leeching off the American people and on the payroll of the elitist corporofascist scumbags, to St. Petersburg, or San Francisco.

Stay free America, more than just the world is watching.

"Godless Colombian Druglord"

Much to my stereotypical Colombian heritage, I make a cameo as a cocaine dealer in my friend's upcoming independant film. Take a sneak peek at the promotional trailer.

Update** --> This promo edits all of the meaty content of my minute-long discourse in the film.



Disclaimer: (As a short political sidenote, the DEA sucks, we should legalize everything, including whatever substance Chuck Finley mixes up one day.)

"Early call: Teixeira for MVP"

I knew after Sunday night's game this article and this article would surface on the internet.

Some of the comments suggested that Tex was insufficiently capable of edging out the award from Morneau. However all these articles failed in their assessment of Mark Teixeira for completely diregarding the fact that he is a superior first baseman to Morneau, and not only to him, but to every other first baseman in the American League. Mark has had a career year at first base, and he is almost surely a lock for the highly respected Golden Glove Award for his position. His fielding percentage is .999, he's been involved in 85 double plays and he's committed one error all year. How many runs, or potential runs for that matter, has Mark prevented? Not only that, Morneau current AL-leading run production, hasn't translated into a first-place team, despite having another potential MVP candidate in the batting lineup every single night. Last time I checked, the team with the best record in baseball usually went on to playoffs. Thank god for some sanity in the local New York press.

We'll revisit this critical issue after the post-season ends with a further analysis of who's my pick for American League MVP. As for the other league, who cares, right? (Pujols is hitting 83 homeruns, driving in 200 runs and batting over .400 for the first time since Ted Williams did in the late 1940's.)

"Webster Hall"

Jokes on them.

"Quote of the Week"

About two minutes ago on Facebook.com -

JD to Clark Ruper: "People aren't stupid, they're just evil. What happens when a bunch of evil people team up? You get collective stupidity."

Now I'm going to get a couple of shotguns to protect my intellectual property from nasty libertarians, ja ja. Truth is, if you want to keep something private, keep it within the confines of your mind. Otherwise, its fair game for the taking.

(That is until the government spits out some nightmarish "thought-identification" apparatus and designates our minds under the jurisdiction of the Thinkpol.)