Freedom of Religion, Right?

So, one of the Republican presidential hopefuls believes towns should have the right to ban mosques. Really, this is the sort of person the Republicans allow to challenge for their ticket?

Last I checked, the United States allowed freedom of religion. One would think that would allow the building of places to practice your religion in wouldn't it? Or, should we go the China route? Maybe make some official state approved mosques for them to go to or else they can just have "home mosques."

He states his concerns center around Sharia law. Ok, I agree. We can't allow religious laws to trump state laws. Certain Muslim sects, and nations, practice versions of Sharia law that are abhorrent and cannot be tolerated in our country. However, those nations are set up as Islamic Nations! It is PART of who they are. It is NOT part of what America is. If practicing aspects of Sharia law, breaks American law, well I'm sorry, the freedom to practice your religion only goes so far. Just ask David Koresh.

I'm also curious as to what he thinks about Judaism after reading this quote from him.

In reference to allowing towns to ban mosques Cain said. "They are objecting to the fact that Islam is both religion and (a) set of laws, Shariah law. That's the difference between any one of our other traditional religions where it's just about religious purposes."

Well, Orthodox Judaism is exactly that. A set of laws. And interestingly enough, they've worked their way into our society with only occasional hiccups. But those problems are dealt with by our legal system.

Finally, Mr. Cain apparently wants to insure any possible radicals stay heavily underground. What's easier to check up on? A mosque where the clerics are known in the community? Or should we force them to practice their religion underground where no one has a clue how radical their teachers might be?

I find it interesting Mr. Cain has chosen to take this route. I guess its easy to prey on fear-mongering among the bigoted and weak-minded, but that's, hopefully, not a path to our Presidency.

I firmly believe that Muslims have as much right as any other religious group to build places of worship. (Sometimes subject to local codes, etc, but the basis for denial of a building permit should never be the faith.) I also firmly believe that we have the laws in place to protect those who could possibly be harmed if some of the more extreme and unfortunate varieties of Sharia were attempted to be followed in the US.

What happened to being FOR allowing people to be free instead of taking rights away from them?

No One Cared

Its a moot point now, but I'll say it anyway:

If you didn't live in LA, or weren't traveling to LA this weekend, you didn't care in the slightest about the "Carmageddon" Interstate shutdown for repairs.

People whine and cry about the media being too biased. I'm whining and crying about the media being too stupid.

This WAS NOT NEWS. It might have been news in LA, I understand. But the coverage it has been getting (seeing the bylines on Google and Yahoo news, from sources as varied as Washington Times to the New York Times).

Now, I understand, lots of news organizations have bloggers that post under the umbrella of a newspaper or whatever.

I still respond, "So? How was this something relevant for a blogger in NY or DC to have a comment on it?"

Yup, here's a blogger in IL commenting on it, but no one cares what I think anyway.

Its a pathetic statement of our news organizations that the have pretty much given up truly covering events overseas or even events in the US anymore due to cost cutting and instead serve up pseudo-news tripe to get click throughs on the web and ad dollars on TV.

Its sad. We have the freedom of the press and we waste it on "Carmaggedon" and Casey Anthony.

Edit: I actually clicked on one of the links last week as I was curious as to what LA had to do with Carmaggedon.

Intriguing...I may have options...

Mitt Romney has declined to sign a second hard right, social conservative "pledge."

First he declined to sign the Susan B Anthony list hard-line anti-abortion pledge. (Anti-abortion in all circumstances, no possible option for rape, incest or life of mother threats.)

Now he has declined to sign the "conservative marriage vow" put out by the Family Leader which in its first iteration stated that more black families had 2 parent homes during slavery than they do today. Talk about complete context fail. Wow.

They changed the language after black pastors complained about the wording, but Romney still declined while stating he supported "traditional marriage."

I'll admit that Romney's Mormon faith makes him a hard candidate for me to accept. I need to see more of his economic policy suggestions to truly overcome my concerns, but it looks like the Romney might emerge as a possible alternative to wasting my vote to keep some far right candidate being elected.

I'm pretty sure 15 months from now when the election is happening, I'll look and laugh or cry at this post, but oh well. Its here. Laugh.

The GOP is broken...and the Democrats are missing out.

Leadership. Its a word that's bandied about in various walks of life. Its something that is completely and utterly lacking in too many facets of life. Our current president has lacked it, as have the leadership in the House and Senate both under Republican and Democratic leadership.

The GOP however, are broken. The Democrats are a joke to a large degree, but the Republican party which is completely beholden to Grover Norquist's "we can't raise taxes at any cost" mantra are broken.

Did you read about the GOP's suggestion on how to raise revenue? It can't be taxes, we'll sell some gov't land. What? Seriously? This is the same joke that states with "balanced budget amendments" (like Illinois) have been doing for years.

We don't want to raise taxes, so we'll sell something that is finite. Brilliant.

People can disagree on how to cut the deficit. Its fine to compromise, but the GOP refusal to allow taxes to be raised, at least to pre-Bush tax cut level is moronic. (Oh, and to the point of lack of leadership Obama's caving on extending the Bush tax cuts is but one of many examples.)

You cannot cut spending out of this. Let me put it this way, you would have to cut EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT MEDICARE, SOCIAL SECURITY AND DEBT PAYMENTS out of the budget to balance it. EVERYTHING.

I'm not saying cuts don't need to be made, they do. I'm not saying tough decisions don't have to be made, they of course do. I'm not saying I'll be happy with where some of the cuts come from, I won't. But tax increases (which are actually closer to a normalization to the pre-Bush era) have to be part of this. And serious tax law changes must happen so that hedge fund managers cannot pay less % in taxes than a doctor or engineer.

If the GOP wants to seriously contend for the presidency and have any sort of legitimacy not built on fear and hatred then moderate party members must stand up and speak out. Currently we have a GOP that is controlled by the moderately far right and the really far right (just stopping short of the extreme far right). This hatred of all things "tax" related while they were happily spending away during the Bush years MUST END. Oh, and yeah, it'd be nice if the President had stood up on that issue when the Bush tax cuts came up for extension last year. See, I'm not just one sided on this.

The GOP desperately needs some members who can still stand for traditional Republican values without being borderline crazy. I'd prefer to have an option to vote for besides Democrat or no one.

Ooops-Wrong Again!

As the hub-bub dies down around Mr. Campings' silly prediction of the end of the world today, I figure I'd point out a few things.

First, the word rapture doesn't appear in the bible as its always bandied about. There are allusions to something like what's been termed "The Rapture" but that word just doesn't appear.

The logical problems brought about by the idea are many. First, a goodly percentage of the bodies of Christians are dust, their atoms now constituting living people. Is it merely going to be souls going to heaven? If so, then you're back to the Platonic idea of duality of the body and soul.

Second, the Bible specifically states NO ONE, but the Lord knows the day or the hour of the end. That would mean, not Mr. Camping. Not Mr. Koresh. Not Jimbob Two-Toothed. Nobody. So, you can come up with some hilarious crackpot mathematical code to the Bible, but in doing so you have to ignore a fairly pointed statement warning against what Mr. Camping (and many others) have tried to do.

Third, this goes back to the rapture problem. As so lovely illustrated in the awful Left Behind books (ok, I saw the first movie and have never even opened one of the books, nor will I) if "the Rapture" would happen chaos would be unleashed upon the earth. Thousands, if not millions would die as planes crash, cars crash, accidents of all sorts occur at jobs.

Now, those in support of the idea say this is all part of the awful things that will happen during "The Tribulation."

I say, it doesn't seem a very loving God who would bring this upon those who He wants to bring into his fold. It might be because I'm a stubborn contrarian, but I sure wouldn't be turning to the God who is unleashing chaos upon the earth. I'd be pissed. But, again, that's just me.

A final issue that ties more into the general problems of reading Revelations in any sort of literal sense is the idea of the final battles between "Good" and "Evil."

In the immortal words of Star Trek V, "Why does God need a starship?" In this instance a starship being an army. I'm pretty sure the slaughter of millions isn't "good" and that God isn't too keen on the death of innocents at the hands of his "holy army."

I could be wrong and I know people would point to the OT to prove me wrong. I'd say that its because the Jews were specifically interpreting God's commands to benefit themselves....but hey, what can ya do?

Inception- Was it really 12 hours long?

Continuing a recent trend of ripping into movies, here is my take on Inception starring Leo DeCaprio and written/directed by Chris Nolan.

I don't know where to begin with this movie. Tons of people loved it, but I'm not sure why. It drags on for 2 hours and 28 minutes that feels much longer than that. The plot doesn't make a ton of sense and wastes tons of time on things that don't actually matter.

Character development is non-existent except for Leo's character to a degree. But, since from the start of the movie you realize the "development" about him you end up wondering how his partner hasn't noticed it before.

A good 3 hours (ok, maybe 20 minutes? it seemed like forever) is spent explaining how they develop the "dream" they are going to be using to go into someone's head. The problem is, they more they explain it, the less sense it makes. This whole process needed to be skipped as it didn't add anything but confusion to a plot that was already hanging by a thread.

Basically, this movie could have been great, it just tried too hard. If Nolan had cut 45 minutes from it, cut out plot development that went nowhere interesting, and focused on making a movie that actually moved faster than molasses, it could have been wonderful. Instead....you got what you got.

The CGI special effects were gorgeous and I give their team full credit for that.

Also, why Ellen Page was cast for her role I don't understand. I liked her in Juno and I think she can do certain roles well, but she seemed horribly miscast for this role. Especially since her character was sort of "forced" in my mind. Of course, most of the plot seemed to exist only to justify other points of the plot existing. You might think that's how all plots are, but...if you watch this movie, it feels very very very contrived and not cohesive or flowing in the least.

I'll give it a 2.5/5 as it wasn't awful, but man, it sure wasn't good.

Salt- WTF?

So, I remembered seeing previews for this movie and then hearing how most of the critics hated it. Ok, I thought, that must mean its a decent action movie. They usually hate those.

Well......

If you go into it wanting to watch an action movie with a nonsensical plot, this is it. To fully enjoy the movie, don't read the box/netflix blurb as it isn't really what the movie is about exactly.

I won't spoil it for you, but prepare to say "what the heck is going on" and "why did they do that?" and "this makes no sense at all" and "come on, really?" a lot.

The action is, well, modern action. Its enjoyable enough. The normal hilarity of 120lb Angelina Jolie (hun, get back up to Tomb Raider size please) being able to go toe to toe with 200lb men. The regular "everyone can hit a bullseye with a pistol while sprinting/leaping through the air" gunplay. Just normal action movie fare. The plot is what did this movie in for me.

Honestly, the movie had lots of potential to be a fun action movie. Instead, someone decided they needed to make the plot ridiculously convoluted and bad instead. Why? I don't know. Its like Hollywood has decided that action movies need lots of plot. No, they don't. More plot just gives a higher probability the movie will suck as the inherent plot problems of action movies come more and more to the forefront.

By the end, the movie I could most compare it to plot-wise was Mission Impossible II. Now, it wasn't as bad as that travesty of a movie (seriously, few movies are) but if you watch Salt and have seen MI II, you'll know exactly what I mean.

So, I'll give it a 2/5, but say that for 99 minutes of your time, there are far worse movies you could waste it on.