Hey, you see this? I haven’t been spending a lot of time with the Democratic presidential candidates, because it doesn’t affect my decisionmaking process at all come election day. I range in my opinion of them from near-complete ignorance (John Edwards) to mild annoyance (Lieberman) to complete disbelief that such a totally obvious liar, charlatan, and gangster is even allowed to breathe free air in our society let alone get five percent of the vote of a political party that still wants to be considered a serious alternative in a functional democracy (Sharpton).

Sorry about that… got a little worked up.

Anyway, the bit that got my attention was the word “steadfast”. Kucinich has been “steadfast” in his opposition to the war on Iraq. It feels like saying, “Hitler remains ‘steadfast’ in his assertion that Europe rightfully belongs to him” or “The patient in room 236 is ‘steadfast’ in his assertion that he is Albert Schweitzer”.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, steadfastness isn’t always a good thing, if you’re wrong. But steadfast is a pretty positive word, it seems, so that the implication is he’s to be commended for his consistency. Steadfastness has the feeling of holding to a position out of principle, despite overwhelming obstacles or pressure to change. Being antiwar in the Democratic party right now is virtually a cost-free position, only slightly more risky than being pro-abortion or anti-big oil. The best you could say about Kucinich is that he’s consistent. But steadfast? Come on. Churchill was steadfast. Reagan was steadfast. Even Bush. Kucinich?

Another synonym for steadfast might be ‘boring’.

Netflix ROX, by the way. You may have noticed the banner. The deal is, you go onto their website and pick out a list of movies you want to see. They have like 15 thousand titles, on DVD. You pay a flat monthly fee, $20, and they send you the first three movies on your list. You take as long as you want to watch them, no late fees. As soon as you return one, in the postage-paid envelope they give you, they send you the next one. It’s great. I’ve been a member for a couple of years, and now that I’m so far from movie theaters and Blockbusters, we get the maximum out at a time- 8.

This is especially great if you like to see movies that are older or foreign or independent. Even when we were in Colorado Springs, there were a lot of movies we couldn’t find at the local rental shop. But they have about everything that’s on DVD.

Self-interest disclaimer- I get paid if you click on my banner and sign up. But I’ve been telling people for a while how great it is for free, so I’m OK with that. I hope you can be too.

I finally broke down and washed my car yesterday. Went down to the local self-serve and hosed the bugs off. I put nine hundred miles on my Corolla last week (which gets about 40 MPG on the highway, perfect car for driving all the freakin’ time) and it was caked with bugs and crap.

This is always a bittersweet moment for me. I like to have a clean car. But I live on a dirt road.

It’s sort of like… uh…

I can’t think of any simile more vivid than washing your car when you live on a dirt road.

A Mighty Wind, as I’m sure most of you know, is the latest Christopher Guest mockumentary, in the same vein as Waiting for Guffman and Best of Show. It’s a similarly constructed film, with much of the same cast, such as Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Michael McKean and Christopher Guest himself.

The movies are all presented as serious documentaries of serious subjects. In A Mighty Wind we follow around three folk-rock acts as they prepare for a reunion to celebrate the passing of the agent who represented all of them. So some of the filming is presented as interviews of the musicians and other people connected to the show, and the rest of the movie shows the characters apparently unaware of the camera, going about their business preparing for the show. Guest allows us to laugh at the characters without comment, without seeming to try to present them as stupid or ridiculous, which they are. We learn about one member of the “New Main Street Singers” who has realized that he suffered abuse in his family, though it was “mostly musical in nature”, and now he has found refuge in the worship of color, a religion which he thinks is so obvious, “you could have realized it going to the corner store.” We see the “New Main Street Singers” rehearsing, all in normal clothes except for one member, the newest, who is being required to wear his band outfit to rehearsals until the band leader deems him worthy to practice in “civvies”.

The best known film of this type, and still the funniest, is This Is Spinal Tap. There’s no one like rock musicians for overblown self-importance and pomposity. There’s tons of material for this kind of humor in the life of a musical act on the road, perhaps especially a heavy metal act. It’s almost impossible to not compare Guest’s later works to Spinal Tap, although it’s unfair to do so. Some have said that of Guest’s work, A Mighty Wind comes closest to Spinal Tap precisely because the subject material is similar. But the movies really are totally different, and as I was watching A Mighty Wind, it did not evoke Spinal Tap at all. Folk singers have a whole different vibe than ’70s rockers, and Guest nails that vibe. Also, Spinal Tap gives us a very focused view of just a few characters, and A Mighty Wind gives a sketch of a larger number of characters. I felt like I would have loved to see a lot more of some of the characters, but a broader focus allows us to get a quick glimpse into a large number of different personalities, and all of them are worth it. So the payoff’s totally different than Spinal Tap.

There’s some sex-related humor which may be off-putting to some. There’s just a couple of places where you would worry about kids. Most of it’s subtle enough that you wouldn’t worry about kids even knowing what’s going on. Like all of Guest’s work, the theme of this is a gentle skewering of the self-important and the strange. But the fact that Guest allows the audience to interact directly with the subjects, without the appearance of any commentary or filter, makes the humor good-natured. The people in Guest’s movies are not so much mocked as they are allowed to make fools of themselves on camera. It drags a little in some places, as all of Guest’s works do. The story structure, or lack thereof, will lose some viewers. He’s kind of a meandering director. But the laughs are big enough to make it worth the effort.

This got 3/5 stars on my Netflix ratings list.

Rent the DVD free from Netflix

I’m not sure what the best way is for us to support marriage as an institution, beyond the obvious of living out the Biblical teaching of marriage in our own personal lives. Here’s an effort by Bush to support a traditional view of marriage, though, and I applaud it.

I am riddled with doubt, however- I can see this just making the pro-marriage side of things look ineffectual, and causing more controversy than support for the issue. I sure don’t know what exactly I would do about it if I were in Bush’s shoes, so I’m mostly glad we have a president who’s willing to do something.

If we on the traditional side of things are correct, then in the long term we are guaranteed success, since those segments of our society which support a traditional view of marriage will be the only ones capable of successfully reproducing themselves (and I don’t mean in the narrow biological sense). When the dust clears, we’ll be the only ones standing. It would be nice, however, if our whole society didn’t have to collapse in ruin to get us there.

From the WSJ– (link requires $)

A new anti-free-trade movement is emerging in the U.S., comprising highly skilled workers who once figured they would be big winners in the globalized economy but now see their white-collar jobs moving overseas in growing numbers.

The new opponents to lowering trade barriers are especially vocal, and their complaints already are getting the attention of Congress and the White House. Their concerns got an unexpected boost Thursday when Intel Corp. Chairman Andy Grove, a pioneer in the American high-tech industry, warned that the U.S. could lose the bulk of its information technology jobs to overseas competitors in the next decade, largely to India and China.

Virtually any analysis will show you that free trade always helps both sides of the deal, as long as it is unrestricted by governments. There are always local disruptions, as in the case of these workers. But ultimately, those who protest the effects of free trade usually end up promoting their own narrow interests, rather than those of the nation as a whole. The article says that 2/3 of the economic impact of losing these jobs flows back to the nation in the form of lower prices. And that’s just the immediate impact. There’s also the economic benefits of competitive pressure on the efficiencies of our industry, the benefits that come from shifting resources into more productive lines of work, and such less tangible benefits that are more difficult to measure, but very real nonetheless.

This is what made American industry so powerful, and kept us from becoming stagnating state-driven economies like Europe is full of these days, and like Japan has become (how long has it been since you heard anyone worrying about Japan taking over the US economically?). Our own efforts at protecting local jobs and industries (steel, airlines, autos) have typically done those industries more harm than good, as we shelter them from competitive pressures until those industries became less and less capable of competing on their own and require more and more taxpayer-funded interventions by government to save them, driving up consumer prices and hurting the economy overall. That’s the question these tech workers need to ask themselves- is it right for the government to use taxpayer dollars to keep these jobs here and drive up prices for the consumers, just to make their lives easier?

I am sorry for people losing jobs in the tech industry, and others. I hope they can adjust quickly. But the best way we can ensure that we have an economy where they can do that, is to allow these things to take their natural course.

But for every example of bad news, like the last post, there’s so many examples of good news, like this story. I wonder if all those who attacked America for doing this will give us the slightest credit for restoring so many millions of people to freedom and prosperity, at least relatively speaking.

This is what will win the war for us- yes, killing terrorists- but also, showing the people over there that a better life is possible, so that the dictators and tyrants that make the terrorists possible have no more place in the world.

A number of Taliban prisoners escaped from one of our jails in Afghanistan. This will, of course, fuel administration critics who will beat the “quagmire” drum, but perhaps we do need to get more realistic about the scope of the resistance we’re facing. There is a suggestion in the article that some of the guards may have helped them.

Here’s a story I came across over at The Volokh Conspiracy:

Student’s discussion of religion with teacher leads to suspension

By The Associated Press

October 1, 2003

KINGSPORT, Tenn. – A lesson on the origin of the universe led to the suspension of an eighth-grade student who failed to follow an order to stop discussing religion with her teacher.

…

The situation started with a discussion of the Big-Bang theory, which says the universe originated billions of years ago in an explosion of a single, superdense atom. Students brought up Christian beliefs about the creation of the universe, and the teacher told them she couldn’t lead a religious discussion, Cline said.

…

The student was suspended last week after encouraging another student to put a religious pamphlet on the teacher’s desk.

“(The teacher) felt like it was a form of harassment,” Cline said. “It was hurtful to her. She’s asked them and talked with them, and after the second or third time, you know she has feelings. She is tired of kids drawing those conclusions about her.”

As Eugene said, it’s hard to know all the details from this somewhat sketchy story, but it seems like the teachers’ feelings here trump the student’s free speech. I don’t like to throw around free speech every time someone gets in trouble for being obnoxious, but beside the incredible double standard on display here, doesn’t a student have free speech rights at a public school? The article says the girl was told to stop discussing religion (how is that even legal?), and the incident that led to the suspension wasn’t even during class. How could this possibly be in the service of order in the school or anything like that? The only consideration quoted in favor of the suspension, or evident from the story, is the teacher’s feelings.

Now I’m no expert in constitutional law, or law in general, but I was always under the impression that free speech in a public forum could only be suppressed if there was a very strong public welfare consideration at stake, something on the order of yelling fire in a theater or threatening to assassinate the president. A teenage girl putting a pamphlet on a teacher’s desk just doesn’t seem to measure up.

We’ll see if the ACLU jumps to this girl’s defense.